University and historical addresses : delivered during a residence in the United States as ambassador of Great Britain

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ADDRESSES: HISTORICAL AND
UNIVERSITY

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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

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TORONTO

UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL
ADDRESSES

DELIVERED DURING A RESIDENCE IN THE

UNITED STATES AS AMBASSADOR

OF GREAT BRITAIN

BY
JAMES BRYCE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1913

All righU reserved

Copyright, 1913,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1913. Reprinted
November, 1913.

NoriDooli i|rc8B

J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

ELIHU ROOT

IN ADMIRATION AND FRIENDSHIP

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PREFACE

During six years spent in Washington it has
been my duty, and also my pleasure, to travel hither
and thither over the United States, responding,
so far as time and strength permitted, to requests
to address Universities, Bar Associations, Chambers
of Commerce, and many other public organizations
of diverse kinds. Out of the many addresses deliv-
ered either to these bodies or in commemoration
of some person or event, I have selected a few,
the subjects of which seemed to possess a more
than passing interest, and of which I had happened
to keep notes, enabling the substance to be re-
produced. In revising them for publication some
additions have been made, while matters of a local
or purely occasional character have been omitted.
The audiences to which the academic addresses
were delivered consisted chiefly of undergraduate
or graduating students.

The enjoyment which I had derived from my
earlier visits to the United States was renewed and
enhanced by the warmth with which I found myself
received and by the encouragement given me to
speak on all non-political topics as freely as if I had
been a citizen of the United States.

viii PREFACE

I desire to take this opportunity of returning my
sincere thanks to those who, in the places where
these addresses were delivered, and in scores of
other cities which I have visited for the like pur-
pose, gave me that encouragement, and extended to
me a welcome the heartiness of which I can never
forget.

Washington,
April 20, 191 3.

CONTENTS

PAGE

The Beginnings of Virginia i

What University Instruction may do to Provide Intel-
lectual Pleasures for Later Life . . . . i$l^
The Landing of the Pilgrims in 1620 • • • • 33
The Influence of National Character and Historical
Environment on the Development of the Common

Law 41

The Conditions and Methods of Legislation ... 73
Thomas Jefferson : Third President of the United States

AND Founder of the University of Virginia . . 107

Missions Past and Present 125

The Mission of State Universities 151

The Art of Augustus Saint-Gaudens 171

Architecture and History 181

The Character and Career of Abraham Lincoln . . 197 _

The Scoto-Irish Race in Ulster and in America . . 205

What a University may do for a State .... 227

Allegiance to Humanity 247

The Tercentenary of the Discovery of Lake Champlain 265

Some Hints on Public Speaking 281

Special and General Education in Universities . . 299

The Study of Ancient Literature 317

On the Writing and Teaching of History . . . 339

Some Hints on Reading 365

National Parks — The Need of the Future . . . 389

The Constitution of the United States .... 407

THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA

Address Delivered at Jamestown Island, Vlrginta, 7\pril 17,
1907, ON THE Tercentenary of the First English Settle-
ment IN Virginia.

UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL
ADDRESSES

THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA

Address Delivered at Jamestown Island, Virginia, April 17,
1907, ON THE Tercentenary of the First English Settle-
ment IN Virginia.

On this day three hundred years ago two small ships
and a pinnace coming from England by way of the
Canary Islands and the West Indies anchored here
and landed their passengers, being about one hundred
and twenty persons in number, upon this Island.
They came from London under a charter from the
King, James the First of England and Sixth of Scotland,
by which there was claimed for the Crown of England
the whole of North America between the thirty-fourth
and forty-fifth degrees of latitude, being the territory
then called Virginia. In the London which these set-
tlers had just left, Shakespeare was then living. Some
of them may have seen him, perhaps with Ben Jonson
beside him, watching the first performance of Hamlet
four or five years before. Sir Francis Bacon — the one
name naturally suggests the other — was living, though
not yet Lord Chancellor. Some of the emigrants may

3

4 UNIJVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

have heard him arguing cases in the courts. John
Milton was born the next year; Sir Walter Raleigh
was a man of fifty-five and then a prisoner in the Tower
of London ; Sir PhiHp Sidney had been killed at Zutphen
in 1586 and Edmund Spenser had died in 1599; Pym
was a youth of seventeen; John Hampden a boy of
seven ; Oliver Cromwell a boy of eight.

The England of those famous men was the England
whence the emigrants came, a land fitted to give
birth to large and noble enterprises. Measured by
what it did for the world, it was a great England,
with great poets, great thinkers, and strong men who
did great deeds. Never before and never since has
such a constellation of brilliant and memorable names
glittered in the English sky. But measured by popu-
lation, England was a little nation, though her states-
men and sailors had not long before won immortal
fame by their defeat of the Invincible Armada. There
were only some five million inhabitants in the country.
Ireland was still but half conquered, and Scotland,
though her King had lately inherited the English throne,
was a distinct and not too friendly kingdom. And
the settlers were few indeed to venture on the task of
occupying the vast continent on which they were
landing. How feeble must their enterprise have seemed
to the men of Spain, which held not only Mexico and
the immense territories north of Mexico, but also the
whole of South America and all the Antilles ! But
God had chosen the weak things of the world to con-

THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA 5

found the things which were mighty, and the things
which were not to bring to nought the things that were.
The Empire of Spain was to decay and dissolve and
vanish away, while from this spot, this islet two mUes
long, where now we see nothing but a few moulder-
ing walls, the power of another race was to spread
out to the Alleghanies and beyond them to the Missis-
sippi, and thence to the Rocky Mountains and the far-
ofi coasts of the Pacific. The oak of English dominion
on the continent of North America lay hidden in the
acorn that was planted on this island in the James
River, just as the germ of English dominion in the
East was to be found in the charter that had been
granted by Queen Elizabeth to the East India Company
seven years before this settlement.

The landing of these few men was one of the great
events in the history of the world — an event to be com-
pared for its momentous consequences with the over-
throw of the Persian Empire by Alexander ; with the
destruction of Carthage by Rome ; with the conquest of
Gaul by Clovis ; with the taking of Constantinople by
the Turks — one might almost say with the discovery of
America by Columbus. Did any idea of the magni-
tude of this event rise in the minds of the little band
of settlers when they read their Royal charter on board
ship before landing; or when they held their first
religious service and set to the building of their fort,
a rude stockade called after the King, "James Town,"
and began to sow their fields with wheat, and build that

6 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

tiny church which the pious care of this generation is
restoring ? There is nothing to show that they had any
such presentiments. Many a settlement tried before
upon the American coasts had failed since the half-
mythic and by that time long-forgotten landing
of Erik the Red in the far Northeast ; and they had
other things than the distant future to think of, for the
Spanish power to the south of them, though then nomi-
nally at peace, was jealous of their intrusion, and the
Indians around them were suspicious and hostile. But
of them it may be said that they, and those who sent
them forth from England, had the true spirit of practi-
cal men who saw the opportunity which a new country
offered to a growing people. They were of the stuff
which makes good settlers, and they did that which the
needs of the time required.

All the dangers and difficulties that were seen or
foreseen they overcame. The power of the mother
country kept them safe against the jealous bitterness
of Spain. They soon proved themselves able to repel
any attacks from the native Indians, and presently
ceased to fear these enemies, though they had for many
years to stand on guard against them. They suffered
so severely from malarial fevers, for in those days the
value of quinine as a remedy had not yet become known,
that after ninety-three years the colonial legislature
decided to remove itself from James To\\ti island to
Williamsburg, eight miles to the northeast, and at last,
in 1780, the capital of Virginia was planted on the higher

THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA 7

and healthier ground of Richmond. But one mis-
take was committed, destined to breed troubles far
worse than any which Indians or sickness threatened.
Twelve years after the first settlement, a Dutch ship
landed a cargo of African negroes, the first that ever
came into the dominions of the English Crown. This
step — a step taken with no prevision of all that was
to issue from it, and one for which the colonists them-
selves were not to blame — established the system of
agricultural slave labor in North America, a system
which we can now see to have been, apart from the
other objections to it, uneconomic and unnecessary ; for
those who have studied, in the light of modern science,
the physical conditions of Virginia and the country south
and southwest of it, tell us that nearly all the area of the
States in which slavery existed seventy years ago, all, in
fact, except the hottest and dampest regions along the
coast, could be cultivated by the labour of white men.
The country would, no doubt, have been developed more
slowly, but there would have been no Civil War and
no race problems such as now occupy your thoughts.
Let it not be forgotten, however, that Virginia was the
first community in the world to recognize the evils
which the slave trade brought with it. Not only did
she, in colonial days, seek in vain to check or abolish it,
but in 1778, in the first years of her independence, when
both in England and in the Northern States powerful
interests were still defending and supporting the slave
trade, she absolutely forbade the bringing of any slaves

8 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

into her territory. And you know how many of
the greatest Virginians, George Mason and Thomas
Jefferson among them, sought to rid their State of
slavery.

Let us, however, return to those first founders of
Virginia whom we are to-day commemorating. Of
the quahties that distinguished them, one, the spirit
of adventure, was common to them with many others
who had crossed the Western Sea. Think of Columbus
when he first showed the path that so many were to
follow ; of Magellan when he threaded his way through
the savage solitudes of the Strait that bears his name,
and traversed week after week and month after month,
with a crew part of which had lately been in mutiny
against him, hard-pressed by thirst and hunger and
scurvy, the seemingly boundless wastes of the unknown
Pacific. Think of Champlain and La Salle when they
found their way among fierce Indian tribes, through the
Northern forests or along the shores of the Great Lakes
as far as the Mississippi. For mere daring and self-
reliant hardihood no expedition has ever surpassed, if
indeed any has equalled, that of Hernando Cortez,
when after burning his ships he marched up far away
from the coast with a tiny band of cavaHers into the
heart of the vast and warlike dominion of the Aztecs.
But there was another quality in which our country-
men and your forefathers stood preeminent. They
came from a free country, though its freedom had not
yet been placed on a secure foundation, for that was

THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA 9

to be the work of the century that had just begun in
England; and the spirit of liberty and the love of
self-government glowed in their hearts.

Herein lay the great contrast between the EngHsh of
that day and the not less valiant adventurers who had
already gone forth from Spain. That the former went
to cultivate the soil and the latter primarily to win gold
and silver, whether by conquest or by the discovery
of mines, is a difference that has often been dwelt
upon. But the future fortunes of the two sets of emi-
grants were even more affected by the difference in
their political temper and ideas. The Englishmen,
though loyal to their sovereign at home, were not dis-
posed to acquiesce in the uncontrolled rule of his
deputies. They had a company to represent in Eng-
land their needs and wishes, and they soon set up in
the new land a system of local courts and assemblies,
modelled on the lines and principles of that which they
had left behind. They valued this inherited freedom,
and as the enjoyment of it had strengthened the charac-
ter and developed the independent and self-reliant spirit
of the individual citizen during three centuries in
England, so it began to do the same wholesome work
on these remote and silent shores.

Modern writers have speculated as to what was
the cargo that these three vessels carried. Of that we
know less than we could wish. Bibles and prayer-
books they certainly had, for they were God-fearing
men, and one of their prime objects was " the planting

lo UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

of Christianity amongst heathens." Whether they
had any law books does not appear. But they carried
in their breasts the principles and traditions of the
common law of England, which of all the legal systems
that have ever been framed is the one most fully per-
vaded with the spirit of liberty and the most favorable
to the development of personal self-reliance and indi-
vidual responsibility. That spirit showed itself from
the first among the colonists of Virginia. They soon
organized their Assembly and began to govern them-
selves so far as the King allowed them. They were
well supported by the Virginia Company in London.
Its debates and the liberal tendencies it evinced caused
disquiet to the Court party and to the King, whose
shrewd and suspicious mind already noted the rising
of the wind which was to swell thirty-three years later
into the tempest of the great Civil War.

How the spirit of freedom and that assertion of
individual rights which the doctrines of the Common
Law favoured went on working through the annals of
colonial Virginia as in those of the great sister and rival
colony of Massachusetts ; how the same spirit prompted
Virginia's action when an unwise English Ministry,
ignorant of the circumstances and feelings of the colo-
nists, blundered into a conflict which ended in their
severance from England ; how the greatest of all
Virginians, clarum et venerahile nomen, led his colony
and its fellow colonies in that conflict ; how the states-
manship of Virginia, matured by the experience of

THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA ii

nearly two centuries, bore its part, and an eminently
useful part it was, in framing the Constitution of 1787,
and gave to the Union four out of its five first Presi-
dents ; how one of Virginia's most illustrious sons.
Chief Justice Marshall, so expounded and developed the
Constitution as to become almost its second author,
— of all this I must not here and now attempt to
speak. Sixty years ago dark days descended upon
Virginia. The fatal error committed in .early years,
from the consequences of which Virginia had vainly
sought to extricate herself, had now borne fatal fruit.
War came, with all the evils that war brings
in its train, and on Virginia those evils fell more
heavily than on any other State. Those were days of
unspeakable sadness and suffering, suffering borne
with the characteristic gallantry of Virginians, and
they produced in Robert E. Lee one of the finest
characters of that age, a man whose purity of heart
and loftiness of soul live in the revering memory not of
America only but of the world of English-speaking men.
But out of the storm there emerged a State delivered
from the blot of slavery, which has now regained its
old prosperity, and there emerged also a national
Republic more truly united than it ever was before.
The jealousies of States, the antagonism of North and
South, the rivalry of Virginia and Massachusetts, have
now happily vanished in a far vaster nation. The
Carolina of Calhoun and the Illinois of Lincoln can
both look back without bitterness on those Virginia

12 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

battle-fields where Lee and Grant won undying fame.
The problems that occupy the thoughts of your people
and tax to the utmost the wisdom of your statesmen,
have, with one exception, that problem which slavery
bequeathed, nothing to do with geographical boundaries.
Never was there in this country so strong a sense that
whatever the future may have in store, the Federal
Union — "an indestructible union of indestructible
States" — must and will be preserved. It is guarded
not only by your national patriotism, but by nature
herself, who has made your land one from the Atlantic
to the Rocky Mountains, a land fit to be the home of
one undivided nation.

In this season of fair weather it is natural that your
eyes should look back across the sea to the ancient
Motherland, from whom you were for a time di\dded
by clouds of misunderstanding that have now melted
away into the blue. Between you and her there is
now an affection and a sympathy such as perhaps
there never was before in the days of your political
connection. To-day she rejoices with you in your
prosperity and your unity. She is proud of you, and
among her many achievements there is none of which
she is more proud than this, that she laid the foundation
of your vast and splendid Republic, giving you those
institutions under which, remodelled to suit your new
conditions and your extended area, your ninety millions
of people now live in peace in freedom.

You have asked me to say what England's message

THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA 13

to America would be on this three hundredth anniver-
sary of the birth of the American nation.

On the occasion of the opening of the Jamestown
Tercentenary Exposition a fortnight ago, I had the
honour of transmitting to the President of the United
States a greeting from the King and his Government
in the following words : —

"On the occasion of the celebrations commemorating
the tercentenary of the foundation of the first English
settlement on the American continent at Jamestown
and the birth of the American nation, his Majesty's
Government wish to offer their warmest congratulations
to the United States Government on the magnificent
progress and development which have brought the
United States into the first rank among the greatest
nations of the world, not only in material prosperity,
but also in culture and peaceful civilization. The
connection which must ever exist in history between
the British and American nations will never be for-
gotten, and will contribute to increase and foster ties
of affection between the two peoples."

These words express the sentiment of the British
people, their sentiment of affection and of pride, of
pride in what you have done already, of hope for
what you may do in the future.

If any words were to be added in which Englishmen
who have reflected upon your history and their own
history would seek to convey their view of the teachings
of English and American experience, I would ask : Could

14 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

the ancient Motherland with her recollections of four-
teen centuries of national life and seven centuries of
slow but steady constitutional development send to her
mighty daughter a better message than this ? " Cherish
alike and cherish together Liberty and Law. They are
always inseparable. Without liberty, there is no true
law, because where law expresses the will not of the
whole community, but merely of an arbitrary ruler or
a selfish class, it has neither moral force nor guarantee
of permanence. Without order and law duly enforced
and equal for all, there is no true liberty, for anarchy
means that the rights of the gentle and the weak are
overridden by the violent. In the union of ordered
liberty with a law gradually remoulded from age to age
to suit the changing needs of the people, has lain and
will always lie the progress and peace both of Britain
and of America."

WHAT UNIVERSITY INSTRUCTION MAY DO
TO PROVIDE INTELLECTUAL PLEASURES
1^ FOR LATER LIFE

Address Delivered at the University of Chicago, June ii,

1907.

WHAT UNIVERSITY INSTRUCTION MAY DO
TO PROVIDE INTELLECTUAL PLEASURES
FOR LATER LIFE

Address Delivered at the University of Chicago, June it,

1907.

Your University is placed in a wonderful city.
In the rapidity of its growth, in the expansion of its
trade and population, it has no parallel in the modern
world, not even in this Western world which has shovni
so many new and startling phenomena. It owes its
prosperity, and it will owe that marvellous future to
which it looks forward, to two things. One is the
eager, ardent, restless spirit, keenly perceptive and
unweariedly active, of your people. The other is
modem science, which has made you the business
centre of the great Northwest and has enabled vast
industrial enterprises to be started aU round the com-
mercial heart of your city. James Watt and the other
famous inventors who have followed him are the men
who have made such a city as Chicago possible. Your
people have turned the possibility into a reality. Two
great departments of human activity, production and
transportation, have been all over the world transformed
by science, and the effect of the change is felt in every
other department.

c 17

1 8 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

It must needs be felt in education also. Seventy
years ago applied science was hardly taught at all in
schools and universities, and theoretic science, except,
of course, mathematics, not at all in schools and but
little in universities. Now science has come to domi-
nate the field of education, and in some countries is
avenging herself for the contumely with which the
old-fashioned curriculum used to treat her by now
herself trying to relegate the study of language and
literature to a secondary place. Nothing could have
been more foolish than the way in which some old-
fashioned classical scholars used to look down upon
chemistry and physiology as vulgar subjects. But
any men of science who wish to treat literature or
history with a like arrogance will make just as great
a mistake.

In England there are some signs of this arrogance,
and it is becoming necessary to insist upon the impor-
tance of the human as opposed to the natural or scien-
tific subjects. Whether this is the case here also
you know better than I do. It need excite no surprise
that there should be a general rush at present towards
those branches of study which have most to promise
in the way of success in life. But I am glad to
know that in the greatest universities of America
ample provision is made for, and all due encouragement
is given to, the humanistic and literary subjects. As-
suming this to be so, assuming that for the purposes
of a general liberal education and also for the purpose

UNIVERSITIES AND INTELLECTUAL PLEASURE 19

of special preparation for the various professions and
occupations, all lines of study are here alike recognized
and efl&ciently taught, I pass to another aspect of
what university education may accomplish.

That which I ask you to join me in considering
is the value and helpfulness to the individual man of
scientific studies and of literary studies, respectively,
not for success in any occupation or profession, nor
for any other gainful purpose, but for what may be
called the enjoyment of Hfe after the days of univer-
sity education have ended.

All education has two sides. It is meant to impart
the knowledge, the skill, the habits of diligence and
concentration which are needed to secure practical
success. It is also meant to form character, to implant
taste, to cultivate the imagination and the emotions,
to prepare a man to enjoy those delights which be-
long to hours of leisure and to the inner life which
goes on, or ought to go on, all the time within his own
breast.

AU study contains or implies the pleasure of putting
forth our powers, of mastering difficulties, of acquiring
new aptitudes, of making the mental faculties quick
and deft like the fingers. It is a pleasure to see the
intellect gleam and cut like a well-tempered and
keen-edged sword. This kind of pleasure can be
derived from all studies, though not from all equally.
Some give a better intellectual training than others;
some are better fitted for one particular type of mind

20 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

than for other types. But with these differences I do
not propose to deal to-day. I want you to think of the
training of the mind, not for work or display, but for
enjoyment. '

Everyone of us ought to have a second or inner life
of the intellect over and above that life which he leads
among other men for the purposes of his avocation, be it
to gain money or power or fame, or be it to serve his
country or his neighbors. Considering himself as a
Mind made to reflect and to enjoy, he ought to have
some pursuit, some taste — if you like, even some fad
or hobby — to which he can turn from the daily routine
of his work for rest and for that change of occupation
which is the best kind of rest, something round which
his thoughts can play when he is alone and in which
he can realize his independence of outward calls, his
freedom from external demands and external restric-
tions. Whatever the taste or pursuit be, whether of a
higher or of a commoner type, to have it is a good thing
for him. But of course the more wholesome and stimu-
lating and elevating the taste or pursuit is, so much
the better.

I Now the question I ask you to consider is this :
What can instruction in natural science do, and what
can instruction in the human or literary subjects do,
to instil such tastes, to suggest such pursuits ? What
sort of teaching and training can a university give to
its student fit for him to carry away from the uni-
versity as a permanent possession for his own private

UNIVERSITIES AND INTELLECTUAL PLEASURE 21

use and pleasure, to be added to by his exertions as he
finds time and opportunity, not that he may be richer
or more famous, but that he may be, if possible, wiser,
and at any rate happier ?

The study of any branch of natural science has one
great charm in the fact that it opens possibilities of
discovering new truth. There is hardly a branch of
physics or chemistry, or of biology or natural history,
in which the patient enquirer may not hope to extend
the boimdaries of knowledge. This is what makes
physical science, as a professional occupation, so attrac-
tive. The work is in itself interesting, perhaps even
exciting, quite apart from any profit to one's self.
One is occupied with what is permanent, one is in
quest of reality, one may at any moment taste the thrill-
ing pleasures of discovery.

But such work requires in most departments an
elaborate provision of laboratories and apparatus, and
(in nearly all departments of research) an amount of time
constantly devoted to observation and experiment which
practically restricts it to those who make it the business
of their life, and puts it out of the reach of persons
actually engaged in some other occupation. Dis-
coveries have been made by scientific amateurs. Ben-
jamin Franklin and his contemporaries, Cavendish
and Priestley, are cases in point. But this is increas-
ingly difficult. Few lawyers or merchants or engi-
neers or practising physicians can hope for time to
enjoy this pleasure. The best that a scientific educa-

22 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

tion can do for them is to start them with enough
knowledge to enable them to follow intelligently the
onward march of scientific investigation.

There is also a pleasure in meditating upon the ulti-
mate problems of matter, force, and life, even if one
cannot do anything toward solving them. The un-
known appeals to our imagination, especially if we have
imagination enough to feel that the unknov\Ti is all
around us, and to realize the grandeur and solemnity
of nature. You all remember the majestic lines in
which the Roman poet declares his passionate
desire that the divine mistresses of knowledge should
explain to him the secrets of the universe : —

Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musae,
Quarum sacra fero ingenti perculsus amore,
Accipiant, coelique vias et sidera monstrent;
Defectus solis varios, lunaeque labores;
Unde tremor terris; qua vi maria alta tumescant,
Objicibus ruptis, rursusque in se ipsa residant.^

The mysteries which chiefly excited Virgil's curiosity
were the movements of the heavenly bodies, the eclipses
of the sun and moon, the cause of earthquakes, and
the theory of the tides. Of these the second and the
last have so long ago been explained that they no
longer greatly engage the thoughts of others than
astronomers, while the causes that produce earth-
quakes are at any rate partially known. Our curiosity
regarding the first, now concentrated upon the move-

1 Virgil in the second book of the Georgics.

UNIVERSITIES AND INTELLECTUAL PLEASURE 23

ments of the so-called Fixed Stars, has of late years
become keener than ever as new vistas of enquiry are
opening themselves to view. Yet it is now that border-
land of physics, chemistry, and metaphysics in which
lie questions relating to the nature of matter itself
and the persistence of force under diverse forms, which
chiefly rouses our wonder, and makes us speculate as
to whether light may be thrown from that side upon
the relations of what is called Matter to what is
called Mind. Whoever possesses even a slight ac-
quaintance with chemistry and physics is more capable
of following the course of investigation in this direc-
tion than are persons altogether without scientific
training ; and these problems are no less fitted to touch
a susceptible imagination than were those which Virgil
vainly sought to comprehend.

In these ways natural science may appeal even to
those whose daily course of life debars them from
continuing to study it ; and this is one of the reasons
which suggests that some knowledge at least of the
method and the fundamental conceptions of science,
mathematical and physical, is a necessary part of a
liberal education.

What we call natural history (i.e. geology, botany,
and zoology) stands on a somewhat different footing.
No pursuits give more pleasure, or a purer kind of
pleasure, than that given by these forms of enquiry.
They take us into open-air nature, they make us fa-
miliar with her, and they generally involve active exer-

24 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

tion of body as well as mind. The only drawback is
that it is difficult for the dwellers in those vast cities,
which have unfortunately grown up during the last
hundred years, to enjoy these pursuits, except for a
few holiday weeks in summer.

If, however, we revert to the question of how much
science can do, in the case of those whose occupa-
tions forbid them to prosecute systematic scientific
study, for the enrichment and refinement of that inner
life whereof I have spoken, we shall find that the range
of its influence is limited. It is only in certain aspects
that it appeals to the imagination, nor does every man's
imagination respond. To the emotions, other than
those of wonder and admiration, it does not directly
appeal. It is remote from the hopes, the fears, the
needs, the aspirations of human beings. While you are
at work on the hydrocarbons in the coUege laboratory,
your curiosity and interest are roused by the remark-
able phenomena they present. But they do not help
you to order your life and conversation aright. Euclid's
geometry is interesting as a model of exact deductive
reasoning. One remembers it with pleasure. A man
who has some leisure and some talent in this direction
may all through his life enjoy the effort of sohdng mathe-
matical problems. But has any one at a supreme mo-
ment of some moral struggle ever been able to find help
and stimulus in the thought that the square described
upon the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal
to the squares described on the two other sides thereof ?

UNIVERSITIES AND INTELLECTUAL PLEASURE 25

By far the larger part of the Hfe of everyone of us
as a being who thinks and feels is that part which puts
him in contact with other human beings, either with the
lives of those whom he meets or with the thoughts and
deeds of those who in time past have done memorable
acts, or have left written words round which his own
mind can play. Man himself — "the little God of the
world " as Mephistopheles calls him^ — is the principal
thing on this globe as we know it, and that which ex-
plains him has after all the deepest interest for us.

Whatever be anyone's occupation, he spends most
of his working hours in the company of his fellow-men.
They may not delight him, as they did not delight
Hamlet, or they may delight him, as they surely must
have delighted Shakespeare. But whether they delight
him or not, they are an inexhaustible field of study ; and
the study becomes more interesting when we compare the
persons whom we meet and observe with the figures that
stand out in the works of those masters of fiction who
have known how to make human nature as true in tale
or drama as it is in fact. So is it, too, with those whose
words and deeds have come down to us from the past.
When one has gazed upon the portraits of famous men
in the long and stately gallery of history, one can view
with a more sympathetic or more humorous eye the
endless picture-show that moves before his vision in the
present.

Accordingly, when we turn from thinking of our

^ In the Prologue to Goethe's Faust.

26 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

active life in the world to the inner or personal life,
it is the human subjects which are best fitted to nourish
it and illumine it. Under the human subjects I include
history, philosophy, and imaginative literature. His-
tory (of which biography is a part) covers all that
man has thought and felt and said and planned and
achieved. It is the best mirror of human nature,
for it describes things in the concrete, human nature
not as we fancy it but as it is. It reveals to us
not only what has been, but how that which is has
come to be what it is. It helps to explain to us our
own generation as well as those that have gone be-
fore. Rightly understood, it does this better than
all the dissertations and exhortations, — plenius et
melius Chrysippo et Crantore, — perhaps better even
than the sermons. That there are many doubtful
questions in history does not materially reduce its
value. The trained historian smiles at those who
say that history is false because some things are and
some may even always remain uncertain ; though no
one will be and ought to be more severe toward those
who recklessly neglect or wilfully pervert the facts
so far as ascertainable.

Psychology and ethics, though they are more and
more seeking, like history, to follow scientific methods,
approach the study of human nature in a more abstract
and general way than history does. They ha^'e the
great interest of appealing directly to indi\ddual
consciousness, and whoever has formed a taste for them

UNIVERSITIES AND INTELLECTUAL PLEASURE 27

will find that he has an infinite field open for observ-
ing the phenomena which he himself and those around
him present. He may even experiment on them, but
such experiments, unless carefully conducted, may be
as dangerous as those which chemists euphemistically
describe as attended by a sudden and rapid evolution
of sound, light, and heat. •

Of literature, as apart from history and philosophy,
there are many branches, but that branch which I seek
to dwell upon for our present purpose is poetry and the
imaginative treatment, whether in verse or in prose,
of human themes. Epic and dramatic poems present
pictures of life as the highest constructive minds have
seen it. Reflective and lyric poems are the finest
expression that has been found for human emotion.
In their several ways they give voice to what in our
clearest moments of vision or at our highest moments
of exaltation, we ordinary mortals are able dimly
to feel but faintly or feebly to express. In this
way they both instruct us and stimulate us more than
anything else can do ; and they also give a rare and
delicate pleasure by the perfection of their form. In
urging on you what imiversities may do to implant a
love of literature which shall last through life, let me
lay especial stress upon the literature of periods remote
from our own. The narratives and the poetry of prim-
itive peoples such as the ancient Hebrews, and the
ancient Greeks, and our own far-off Teutonic and Celtic
forefathers have the incomparable merit of presenting

28 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

thought and passion in their simplest form. They do
us an immense service in illuminating the annals of
mankind as a whole, by making us feel our own identity
with and yet also our differences from the earher phases
of human society. They give a sense of the growth
and development of the human spirit which carries us
out of our own narrow horizon, which makes all the
movements of the world seem to be part of one great
drama, which saves us from fancying ourselves to be
better or wiser than those who went before, which
ennobles life itself by the ample prospect which it
opens.

Most — though not all — of the literature I am
speaking of can be fully enjoyed and appreciated only
in the languages in which it was originally composed.
These are vulgarly called "dead languages." Let no
one be afraid of that name. No language is dead which
perfectly conveys thoughts that are alive and are as
full of energy now as they ever were. An idea or a
feeling grandly expressed lives forever, and gives im-
mortality to the words that enshrine it.

Let me add that it is in large measure through
literature that we have been able to enjoy the pleas-
ures of nature and those of art. Whoever possesses
a sense for form and color may appreciate a fine pict-
ure without any knowledge of the technique of pamt-
ing. But he will see comparatively little in it if his
taste has not been formed and trained by the study of
masterpieces and if his mind has not received the cul-

UNIVERSITIES AND INTELLECTUAL PLEASURE 29

tivation which letters and history give. So a man need
not have read the poets to be able to find delight in a
beautiful landscape. But he will enjoy it far more if he
knows what Thomson, Cowper, Burns, Scott, Shelley,
Ruskin, and above all, Wordsworth, have written.
How much have they done to increase a sense of
the charm of nature in all who use our tongue !

What are the practical conclusions which I desire
to submit to you as the result of these suggestions ?
They are two.

The ardour with which the study of the physical
sciences is now pursued for practical purposes must
not make us forget that education has to do a great
deal more than turn out a man fitted to succeed in
business. It must also endeavour to give him a power
of enjoying the best pleasures. The physical sciences
do open such pleasures, but these are not so easily
obtained, nor so well adapted to stimulate and polish
most minds, nor so calculated to strengthen and refine
the character, as those which can be drawn from the
human or literary subjects.

Secondly, in the study of such literary subjects as
languages and history, we must beware of giving
exclusive attention to the technicalities of grammar
and to purely critical enquiries. There is some risk
that in the eagerness to apply exact methods so as
to secure accuracy and a mastery of detail, the literary
quality of the books read and the dramatic and personal
aspect of the events and persons studied may be too

30 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

little regarded. Exact methods and the whole ap-
paratus of grammatical lore have their use for the
purposes of college training, but in after years it
is the thoughts and style of the writers, the perma-
nent significance or the romantic quality of the events,
that ought to dwell in the mind. There is certainly
in England a tendency, perhaps due to German in-
fluences, to hold that history ought, in order that
it may be thoroughly scientific, to welcome dulness
and dr3mess. It is said, I know not with what truth,
that the same tendency is felt here. The ethical side
and the romantic side may have been overdone in
time past, but it must never be forgotten that one of
the chief aims of history is to illustrate human nature.
We need throughout life to have all the light thro^^^l
upon human nature that history and philosophy can
throw ; to have all the help and inspiration for our own
lives that poetry can give. Much of everyone's work
is dull and monotonous, perhaps even depressing, and
that escape from the dulness of many a business career
which the strain of fierce competition or bold specula-
tion promises is a dangerous resource. It is better to
nurture and cherish what I have ventured to call the
inner life. Not all can succeed ; none can escape sor-
rows and disapointments. He who under disappoint-
ments or sorrows has no resources within his ovm
command beyond his daily round of business duties,
nothing to which he can turn to cheer or refresh his mind,
wants a precious spring of strength and consolation.

UNIVERSITIES AND INTELLECTUAL PLEASURE 31

Nowhere in the world is there so strong a desire
among the people for a university education as here
in America. The effects of this will no doubt be
felt in the coming generation. Let us hope they will
be felt not only in the completer equipment of your
citizens for public life and their warmer zeal for civic
progress, but also in a true perception of the essential
elements of happiness, an enlarged capacity for enjoy-
ing those simple pleasures which the cultivation of
taste and imagination opens to us all.

THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS IN 1620

Address at Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, July,

1907.

THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS IN 1620
Address at Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, July, 1907.

First let me thank you, in behalf of the Sovereign and
the people whom I am honoured by being deputed to
represent in the United States, for your invitation to
join in the celebration to-day of a great event. It is
fitting that Old England, whence came the settlers
whose landing at this spot you commemorate, should
be remembered here in this oldest part of New England
and should send you her greeting.

These colonists were men of the right stamp to settle
and develop a new country. England gave you of her
best, and she gave them in a great crisis of her own fate.

She has ever since watched the fortunes of their
descendants, marking their growing greatness, and
never with more pride, more sympathy, and more
affection than she does to-day.

Many of you may remember to have seen some-
where on the island-girt coasts of Massachusetts or
Maine a rainbow stretching from one isle to another,
and seeming to make a radiant bridge from land to land.
It is a beautiful sight, and still more beautiful when the
rainbow is a double one.

In this shape of a double rainbow, bridging the ocean

3S

^6 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

from England to America, there presents itself to me
the double settlement of this continent by the men
who founded Virginia and the men who founded
Massachusetts. The rainbow is the s3anbol of hope,
and America has been and still is to Europe the Land
of Hope. Over this bridge of hope millions have passed
from the Old World hither, and it is in the spirit of hope
for the future of a land so blessed by Providence as
yours that we of England send our hearty greetings.

Much has been said — indeed, little has been left
unsaid — in praise of the Pilgrim Fathers, for this coun-
try is fertile in celebrations, and I cannot hope to say
anything new about them. But every man must
speak of a thing as it strikes him.

I ask myself, when I think of these exiles coming to
make their home on what was then a bleak and desert
shore : What was it that brought them thither ? Was
it the love of civil liberty? They loved civil hberty,
for they had suffered from the oppression of the royal
officers, but it was not mainly for the sake of that
liberty that they came, nor indeed had the great struggle
yet begun when they quitted England to spend those
years in friendly Holland which preceded their voyage
hither. Nor were these Pilgrims made of the same stem
fighting stuff as the Puritans who came to another
part of Massachusetts Bay a little later and became
the founders of Salem and Boston.

Was it for the love of religious liberty ? Not at any
rate for such a general freedom of conscience as we and

THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS IN 1620 37

you have now long enjoyed, not for the freedom that
means an unquestioned right to all men to speak and
write and teach as they would. The proclamation of
that general freedom and the rights of the individual
conscience might not have been altogether congenial to
either Pilgrims or Puritans. Certainly it had not yet
been made by its noble apostle, Roger Williams, the
founder of Rhode Island, the most original in his think-
ing and perhaps the most lovable in his character of all
the founders of North American Colonies.

What these Pilgrims did desire and what brought them
here was the wish to worship God in the way they held to
be the right way. It was loyalty to truth and to duty as
they saw it that moved them to quit first their English
homes and friends, and then their refuge in Holland, and
face the terrors of the sea and the rigours of a winter far
harsher than their own, in an untrodden land, where
enemies lurked in trackless forests.

No one expected to find gold on the shores of Massachu-
setts Bay. No one hoped for that fountain of youth
which Ponce de Leon had sought in Florida a century
before. No one dreamed of the mighty State which
was to grow out of the tiny settlement.

Not in the thirst for gold ; not in the passion for
adventure ; not for the sake of dominion, but in faith
and in duty were laid the foundations of the Colony
and State of Massachusetts.

Is not this what their settlement means to us now
after three hundred years? Faith and duty, when

38 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

mated to courage (for without courage they avail Httle)
are the most soHd basis on which the greatness of a
nation can rest. The strength of a State lies in the
characters of its citizens.

It is a far cry from Massachusetts to Italy, but when
I think of these forefathers of yours, — and here I think
of the Puritans as well as the Pilgrims, and of the men
of Connecticut and Rhode Island as well as the men of
Massachusetts, — men of plain, stern lives, of high pur-
poses and steadfast wills, I am reminded of the famous
line in which the great Roman poet says that it was on
the austere simplicity of her olden days and the strong
men she reared that the might of Rome was founded.

Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque.

Such men were your Puritan makers of New England.
They were hewn from the same rock as those soldiers
of Cromwell, some of whom were doubtless their kins-
folk, before whom every enemy went down, and to
whom was fitly applied that verse from the Hebrew
Psalm : "Let the praises of God be in their mouths and
a two-edged sword in their hands."

They were men of a bold and independent spirit, but
they knew the value of law, and these Pilgrims of A. d.
1620, coming into a region for which no government
had yet been provided, bound themselves to one another
by a solemn compact signed in the cabin of their ship ;
constituting themselves "a civill body politick" with
power to "enacte just and equall lawes," to which they

THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS IN 1620 39

promised all due submission and obedience, thereafter
choosing one of themselves to be their Governor for
the year ensuing.

Many generations have come and gone since the
November days when the little Mayflower lay rocking
in yonder bay, with the Pilgrim mothers and sisters look-
ing out wistfully over the cold, gray waters, in those days
silent and lonely, and with the children, cooped up for
many a weary week, asking when, at last, they would
be put on shore.

Many things have come to pass, both in England and
here, which those grave, grim ancestors of yours might
disapprove, good and necessary as you and we may
think them. But one thing remains as true now as it
was then.

The fearless man who loves truth and obeys duty
is the man who prevails and whose work endures.
The State which has such men, and to which such men
are glad to render devoted service in war as in peace,
grows to be the great State. Those men bequeathed
to you traditions and the memory of high thoughts
and brave deeds which have been helpful to you ever
since in many an hour of need, and will be helpful to
you while your Republic stands. Many new elements
have entered into the American people, and much of the
blood of the New England of to-day comes from other
than old English sources. But there is an inheritance
of the spirit as well as of the blood, and the type
survives because it has become a part of the character

40 UNIVERSITY AND mSTORICAL ADDRESSES

which each generation transmits to those who come
after. So may the type of the resolute, God-fearing
men who laid the foundations of this Commonwealth
abide with you for ages to come.

You are setting the corner-stone of a Tower which,
looking far out over the waves of the Atlantic, shall com-
memorate those who laid the foundations of the Com-
monwealth of Massachusetts, an event worthy of ever-
lasting memory. Yet there is a sense in which we may
deem that no monument piled high in stone is needed.

It was said by a famous statesman of antiquity that
'' the whole earth is the tomb of illustrious men." So the
wide land which the descendants of these settlers have
covered with flourishing cities and in which they them-
selves planted the first seeds of civil and ecclesiastical
government is itself their most enduring monument.

In their darkest days one wrote to them from Eng-
land : "Let it not be grievous unto you that you have
been instruments to break the ice for others. The
honour shall be yours to the world's end." That
honour has been theirs and will be theirs.

From Cape Cod here close beside you to Cape Flat-
tery on the far-off shores of the Pacific, corn-fields and
mines, railroads, and populous cities, State Houses
where legislatures meet, and courts where justice is
dispensed, all bear witness to the men who here began
the work of civilizing a continent and establishing in
it a government rooted from the first, and rooted deep,
in the principles of liberty.

THE INFLUENCE OF NATIONAL CHARACTER
AND HISTORICAL ENVIRONMENT ON THE
DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW

Address Delivered to the American Bar Association at its
Annual Meeting in Portland, Maine, August, 1907.

THE INFLUENCE OF NATIONAL CHARACTER
AND HISTORICAL ENVIRONMENT ON THE
DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW

Address Delivered to the American Bar Association at its
Annual Meeting in Portland, Maine, August, 1907.

Not long ago I had occasion to read an opinion ren-
dered on a point of law by an eminent legal practitioner
in a Spanish-American country. The point itself was
one which might have arisen equally well in the United
States or in England. But the way of approaching it
and dealing with it, the turn of thought and the forms
of expression, were curiously unlike those which one
would have found in anyone trained in the Common
Law whether in the United States or in England. This
unlikeness pointed to some inherent difference in the
way of looking at and handling legal questions. Many
of you have doubtless had a similar experience, and
have been similarly led to ask what is at the bottom of
this difference between the legal ideas and legal methods
of ourselves whose minds have been formed by the
study of the Common Law and the ideas and methods
of the lawyers who belong to the European continent
or to South and Central American States. French,
German, Italian, Spanish lawyers are all more like one

43

44 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

another than any of these are to EngHshmen or Ameri-
cans.

The causes of this difference lie far back in the
past. It would have been discernible in the
seventeenth century, and might indeed have
been even more marked then than it is now. Two
hundred years ago the law of England had already
acquired a distinctive quality, and that quality has
remained distinctive until now, both here and in Old
England, although the substantive provisions of the
law have been changed in many respects by the eco-
nomic and social progress which the two branches of the
race have made, and by the new conditions under
which those branches live. We may still with truth
speak of the Common Law as being the common posses-
sion of the United States and of England, because that
spirit, those tendencies, those mental habits which
belonged to the English stock when still undivided
have been preserved. The causes that produced them
belong to a period long anterior to 1776, when the an-
cestors of Marshall, Kent, Story, Taney, Webster,
Curtis, were living in English villages side by side with
those of Coke, Hale, Holt, Hardwicke, Blackstone,
Eldon, and the other sages who adorn the English roU
of legal fame. These causes were indeed at work far
back in the Middle Ages. Just as the character of an
individual man is in its essence formed before he
attains manhood, though the circumstances of his life
modify it, giving prominence to some parts of it and

DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 45

leaving others undeveloped, so in those early centuries
were formed that set of ideas and that type of mind
which took shape in the provisions and the procedure
of the old law of England. The substance of these pro-
visions was partly general, that is, such as must exist in
every organized and civUized society, partly special,
such as the particular conditions of the country and
the time needed. The form was due to the lawyers,
whether judges, writers, or practitioners. Now the
form has greatly affected the substance, and has proved
hardly less permanent. When we study the growth of
the Common Law we must think not only of the rules
of inheritance, the doctrine of consideration for a
contract, the conception of felony, the definition of
manor; we must think also of the forms of actions,
of the jury, of the authority of decided cases. All
these were already well settled before the first English
colonist set foot on the American continent. They
had become part of the life and legal consciousness of
the nation.

What would an observer who had studied legal his-
tory in general select as the distinguishing qualities, the
peculiar and characteristic notes of the Common Law ?

First, its firm grasp of the rights of the individual
citizen. He is conceived of, he is dealt with, as a centre
of force, an active atom, whirling about among other
atoms, a person in whom there inhere certain powers
and capacities, which he is entitled to assert and make
effective, not only against other citizens, but against

46 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

all other citizens taken together ; that is, as against
the state itself and its visible embodiment or organ, the
executive government.

Secondly, its recognition of the state and the execu-
tive as clothed with the authority of the whole com-
munity, as being an effective power, entitled to require
and compel the obedience of the individual wherever
and whenever it does not trespass on the rights which
are legally secured to him. To be effective, law must
have not only physical force behind it, but also the
principle of legitimate authority, the sense in every
citizen that his individual free will has its limits, and
can be exerted only within the sphere allotted to it.
Liberty is, in a civilized community, the child of law.
It is not his own pleasure, but the fact that the com-
munity has recognized a certain sphere of unchecked
action as belonging to him, within which he can do
as he pleases, that secures the citizen in his rights.
Outside that sphere he must not only obey, but
cooperate with the executive. It is his duty to aid
in preventing a crime, in suppressing disorder, in
arresting an offender. A sheriff exercising his functions
can call on all persons present to support him, and
they are bound to support him, a wholesome and, if
you like, a truly democratic doctrine. The law
is the people's law, not only in its origin, but also for
the purpose of its enforcement.

These two principles go together. The one is a
safeguard against Tyranny, i.e. the absolute and capri-

DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 47

cious will of the governing power, the other against
Anarchy, i.e. that unrestrained and unlimited exercise
of the will of each and every citizen which must result
in collision, disorder, and the triumph of mere force.

It may be suggested that these two principles are not
peculiar to the Common Law, because no law could grow
up, and no state could prosper, without both of them.
That is true. But there have been systems of law in
which sometimes the one, sometimes the other, prin-
ciple was imperfectly developed, and (so to speak)
overweighted by the other. The former principle es-
pecially (viz. the recognition of the rights of the citi-
zen) has often been quite too weak to secure due pro-
tection to the individual man. It is the clearness
with which both have been recognized, the fulness with
which both have been developed, in the mediaeval and
post-mediaeval English law that constitute its highest
merit.

From the equal recognition of these two principles
there follows a third characteristic. If principles
apparently antagonistic are to be reconciled, there
must be a precise delimitation of their respective bounds
and limits. The law must be definite and exact.
Now precision, definiteness, exactitude are features
of the Common Law so conspicuous that the unlearned
laity sometimes think they have been developed to an
inordinate degree. They have made the law not only
very minute, but very technical. But of this anon.

With the love of precision there naturally goes a love

48 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

of certainty and fixity. The spirit of the Common Law
is a conservative spirit, which stands upon what exists,
distrusting change, and refusing change until change
has become inevitable. ^^ Stare super antiquas vias:"
"Nolumus leges Anglice mutarV^ (the words of the
barons at the council of Merton in Henry the Third's
day) : "It is better that the law should be certain than
that the law should be just," these were favourite dicta
among the lawyers of the old school in England.

The respect for what has been settled, and the desire
that what has been settled should be definite in its
terms, import a deference to precedent. No legal
system, not even the Mussulman law, grounded on
Koranic interpretation and traditions, has ever gone
so far in obedience to what was ruled in the past as the
Common Law does in basing itself on cases judicially
determined and recorded.

Judicial decisions are given, legal precedents are
made, as events bring them. There is no order among
them except the chronological. Thus a law constructed
out of them is necessarily wanting in symmetry. The
Common Law is admittedly unsymmetrical. Some
might call it, as a whole, confused, however exact may
be the propositions that compose it. There are general
principles running through it, but these are often hard
to follow, so numerous are the exceptions. There are
inconsistencies in it, where decisions apparently con-
flicting have been given by different authorities at dif-
ferent times. There are gaps in it, where no decision

I

DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 49

has happened to cover a particular set of circumstances.
Thus there has been formed a tendency among lawyers
to rate principles, or, let us say, philosophical and logical
views of the law, very low compared with any positive
declaration made by a court. The maxim, "An ounce
of precedent is worth a pound of principle," still ex-
presses the attitude of the profession in England, and
very possibly here also.

With the love of certainty and definiteness there
goes a respect for the forms of legal proceedings and
for the precise verbal expression given to rules. This
is a quality which belongs to most legal systems in their
earlier stages. It was very highly developed in the
early days of Rome and the early days of Iceland. In
the Common Law it held its ground with great per-
tinacity till quite recently, both in England and here ;
nor am I sure that it is not now strong in some of your
states, possibly stronger than in the England of to-day,
in which, especially since the sweeping changes made
by the Judicature Act of 1873, the old distinctions
between forms of actions are being forgotten.

You may think that among the features that char-
acterize our Common Law I ought to name the love of
justice and also the fondness for subtle distinctions. I
do not, however, dwell on the latter of these, because it
belongs to aU legal systems that reach a certain point of
development, and is even more evident in some others
than in our own. The robust common sense which
is inherent in the Common Law seldom encouraged

50 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

fine distinctions to go beyond a certain point. As for
the love of justice, it belongs to mankind generally,
and to all systems of law. Such differences as may be
noted between different peoples consist not in the reahty
of the wish to give every man his due, — suum cuique
tribuere, — but in the self-control which prevents emo-
tional impulses from overriding justice, in the practical
good sense which perceives that to allow the forms of
law to be neglected or unusually harsh treatment to
be inflicted where a cause or a person happens to be
unpopular, is really to injure the community by im-
pairing the respect for law itself and the confidence in
its administration. Englishmen and Americans may
claim that although, like others, they have sometimes
lapsed from the right path, they have, on the whole,
restrained their passions from trampling upon justice,
and upon the regular methods of securing justice, better
than most nations have done.

The foregoing characteristics of our Common Law
are submitted for your consideration, not as being the
only ones which belong to it, for others might be added,
but as being characteristics so broad and salient as to
make it comparatively easy to discuss them and to
endeavour to account for them. Some are found in all
systems that have reached a high level of scientific
development, being indeed qualities mthout which no
system could be deemed excellent. Only one other
system, the Roman, possesses them in so large a meas-
ure as to deserve comparison.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 51

To what are we to ascribe these features distinctive
of the Common Law? The in-dweUing qualities of
the race of men who built it up must have been a prin-
cipal and indeed the primary cause. The mind and
character of a people are indeed more exactly and ade-
quately expressed in and through its law and institutions
than they are through its literature or its art. For
books and paintings are the work of individual men,
many of whom may have been greatly influenced by
foreign ideas or foreign models ; and some of whom,
powerful enough to influence their successors, may not
have been typical representatives of the national genius.
But laws are the work of the nation as a whole, framed
indeed by the ruling class, and shaped in their details
by a professional class, but to a large extent created
by other classes also, because (except in those few cases
where a conqueror imposes his own law on the van-
quished) the rules which govern the relations of the
ordinary citizen must be such as suit and express the
wishes of the ordinary citizen, being in harmony with
his feelings and fitted to meet the needs of his daily
life. They are the offspring of custom, and custom is
the child of the people. Thus not only the constructive
intellect of the educated and professional class but the
half-conscious thought and sentiment of the average
man go to the making and moulding of the law. It is
the outcome of what German philosophers call the
legal mind {Rechtsbewusstsein, or Legal Consciousness)
of a nation.

52 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

But law is the product not of one or two generations,
but of many. National character is always insensibly
changing, and changing more rapidly the more ad-
vanced in civilization the nation becomes, the greater
the vicissitudes in its fortunes, and the more constant
or intimate its intercourse with other nations. Hence
institutions become the expression of historical in-
fluences as well as of those original gifts and
tendencies of a race or a people which we observe
when it emerges from prehistoric darkness. Time and
circumstances cooperate in the work. Law is the
result of the events which mould a nation as well as of
the mental and moral qualities with which the nation
started on its career. These two elements are so mixed
and blent in their working that it is hard to describe
them separately. Nevertheless let us try. Let us
begin by a glance at the inborn talents and temper of
the English people, and then see how the course of
history trained their powers and guided their action.

All the Teutons are strong, resolute, even wilful;
and the Low Germans and Nortlmien were the most
active and forceful branches of the Teutonic stock.
Every man knew his rights and was ready to assert
his rights by sword and axe. Not only so, — he was
ready, where society had become advanced enough for
courts to grow up, to assert his rights by legal process
also. Read the Icelandic Sagas, in which records of
killings and of lawsuits are mingled in about equal
proportion, if you wish to realize how keen was the

DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 53

sense each freeman had of his own claims, and how reso-
lute he was in enforcing them. Never was there a
people more fond of legal strife than were the Nor-
wegians and Danes, who spread themselves over East-
ern Britain in the ninth and tenth centuries, or than
their brethren, whom Rolf Ganger led to the conquest
of the northern coast of France in the ninth century.
The Norman peasant is proverbial to-day in France
for his litigiousness.

In this self-assertiveness, however, there is no dis-
regard of duly constituted authority. The primitive
Teuton had his Folk Mot in England, his Thing in Nor-
way and Iceland. He was loyal to his chief or king.
He felt his duty to the community wherein he lived.
He did not always obey the law, but he respected the
law, and felt the need of its enforcement.

It belongs to a strong race to have the power of self-
control. Our forefathers were fierce and passionate,
like other half -civilized peoples, but they had this power,
and they restrained themselves from overriding the
process of law and letting passion work injustice many
a time when men of other races, Greeks, or Slavs, or
Celts, would have yielded to their impulses. So too
they had a latent solidity and steadiness which indis-
posed them to frequent or fitful change. Compared
with their Slavonic neighbours to the east and their
Celtic neighbours to the west, races at least as intel-
lectually quick and intellectually fertile, the Teutons
have always been of a conservative temper. This may

54 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

be — so we like to think — a mark of good sense and
patience, or it may be an attribute of dogged and slowly
moving minds. Anyhow, there it is, and (as already
remarked) it is, for the purposes of law-building, a
merit of the first magnitude.

Further, the mediaeval English mind was of a practi-
cal rather than of a speculative type. It had plenty
of acumen, plenty of logical vigour. But it did not run
to the spinning of theories or the trying of experiments.
This has been characteristic more or less of the Enghsh
and the American mind, and, I may add, of the Low
German or Dutch mind, ever since, as compared "with
the Scotch mind and with that of our brethren the
High Germans of the European Continent. For those
who were destined to create a great and complex legal
system, it was an excellent quality. Speaking to an
American audience, no one would venture to disparage
ingenuity. The jurist needs it daily. But the jurist
who is making the law needs caution and practical
judgment even more ; and with all your ingenuity, it
has never been your way either to run ahead of actual
needs or to pull up the plant to see whether the roots
are sprouting.

Here, then, we have noted five characteristics of
those to whom we owe the Common Law. They were
strong men and pugnacious m.en ; they respected au-
thority ; they could at need control their impulses ;
they were not given to change ; they were not fertile
in theory or invention. With these qualities they

DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 55

started on the work of making law. How did the
conditions of England from the twelfth to the eigh-
teenth century affect them, and so guide their action
as to bring out in the fulness of time the legal product
we have inherited, a fruit very different from that
which ripened under the sun of Germany or France ?

The English king in the Middle Ages was strong,
stronger than the kings of France or Castile or Aragon.
He was from the days of Henry II onwards effective
master (except for brief intervals) of the whole realm.
He was able to make his executive authority feared
even if it was sometimes disobeyed. His writ ran
everywhere. His judges travelHng through the country
brought the law to the sight of all men.

His aim, and that of his judges, was during the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries to build up one law,
instead of the variety of the diverse customs such as
had grown up in Continental Europe. Thus he and
they must needs strive to make the law clear and cer-
tain. Such it became. Here and there, as in Kent and
in some old boroughs, local land customs survived, yet
not enough to mar the unity and definiteness of the
law as a whole.

From good motives as well as bad ones, the king was
tempted to stretch his authority, and make himself
almost a despot. He was so strong over against the
barons that they were obliged from time to time to ally
themselves with the church — usually their antagonist
— and with the middle class of small landholders and

56 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

burghers. This alliance was in the interests of freedom
and of a limitation of royal power. To it we owe
Magna Charta, and the long line of restrictions there-
after imposed on arbitrary government. Now Magna
Charta is the declaration of one generally binding law.
It enounces and consecrates, and is itself, Lex Terrae,
the law of the whole land, and of all persons therein.
It is for us of the English stock the parent of all in-
struments defining the relation of citizen and sovereign,
be the sovereign a king or the people. It is the an-
cestor of your own federal constitution, as well as of the
"Bill of Rights" provisions of aU State constitutions.
Just as the barons and the people were obHged to
base themselves upon the solemnly made engagements
of the Crown as the evidence of their immunities, so
the Crown, acting through its judges, not being strong
enough to make its own policy or view of what was
right prevail as a mere exercise of the sovereign's own
will, and desiring to have some positive authority to
set against the texts quoted from imperial or papal
law by the civilians or the canonists, was forced to rely
upon acts previously done, and decisions pre\ious]y
delivered, and to found the law upon them. Thus both
parties were led to appeal to and lay stress upon prece-
dents. The rights which the law enforced were, as
usually happens in early times, much involved with
the procedure for enforcing them ; and the desire to
secure uniformity of procedure in the king's courts led
to the constant citation of judgments delivered on

DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 57

previous occasions. Under these conditions, and
favoured by them, there grew up that habit of record-
ing and following decided cases which is so eminently
and indeed uniquely characteristic of the Common Law.

The balance of forces in English mediaeval society
appeared most clearly in the relations of lord and vassal.
Each had unquestionable rights, and these rights were
apt to come into conflict. The adjustment of conflict-
ing claims gave constant occupation to the lawyers and
the judges, and, while forming habits of exact thought
and precise statement, it created a great mass of techni-
cal learning. The older English land law was indeed
as intricate and elaborately artificial a body of rules
as the world has ever seen. Though modified in some
important points, it lasted with us until less than a cen-
tury ago, when it began to be so cut about by amending
statutes as to lose its ancient logical cohesion. For
some reason or in some way which is not clear to most
of us, many of its technical doctrines were held not
applicable to land in North America, so you have es-
caped most of the complications it handed down to us.
But the process which produced it left a deep impress
on the law generally. Some of the faults, some also
of the merits, of the Anglo-American way of handling
legal questions are due to the ancient land rights and
the procedure followed in trying the issues that arose
under them.

English freedom, in the particular legal form it took,
sprang out of feudal conditions. In reality, it was

58 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

older than feudality, and had lost some of its simple
Teutonic breadth when overgrown by feudal notions.
But the structure of parliament and the right of parlia-
ment alone to impose taxes sprang out of the relation
of the king (as feudal lord) to his tenants, which is in
a certain sense a private relation as well as a political
one. It is hardly too much to say that what we call
the public or constitutional law of England is a part
of, as it has certainly grown out of, the private law.
Some of our fundamental constitutional principles
have been established by decisions given in private
suits. And although you in America can draw a
sharper line between public and private law than can
be drawn in England, because you have a written or
rigid constitution, and we have, strictly speaking, no
constitution at all, still the old character of the Common
Law remains plainly visible in the fact that many of
the most important questions that have arisen on the
construction of your federal and state constitutions
have arisen in suits between private parties, where
the primary issue before the court was one in which
the rights of those parties had to be determined.

I have referred to exactitude of thought and expres-
sion as one of the excellencies which we justly admire
in the sages of the Common Law and particularly in
the deliverances of the judges. That exactitude has
become a feature of all our legal thinking and legal
writing, and has in particular made us separate more
clearly than the lawyers of most other nations do,

DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 59

considerations strictly legal from those which belong
to the sphere of morality or sentiment. We owe this in
no small measure to the old system of pleading which,
slowly matured and refined to an excessive point
of technicality, gave to the intellects of many genera-
tions of lawyers a very sharp edge. That system had
the great merit of impressing upon them the need for
distinguishing issues of law from issues of fact. The
first lesson a student learns is to consider in any given
case whether he ought to plead or to demur. It is a
lesson of value to all of us in our daily life. Half the
confusions of thought in the world, certainly not ex-
cepting the world of political discussion, arise because
men have not learnt to ask themselves whether the
issue is one of fact or of principle. "Do I deny the
facts or do I dispute the inference ? Ought I to plead
or to demur?"

It is a remarkable fact that although the Common
Law came into existence at a time when personal slav-
ery was not extinct in England, and had reached an
advanced state of development before praedial slavery
or villenage had died out, the existence of slavery in
the North American colonies had nothing to do with
either English institution, but arose quite independently
in colonial days. Though villenage existed at Common
Law, and is said to have lasted into the seventeenth
century, personal slavery does not, I think, stand re-
corded and recognized in any English Common Lawbook
of authority or in any decided case, and I suppose that

6o UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

the incidents of negro slavery in the colonies, doubtless
practically assumed before anyone thought of specific
legal sanction, were either parts of the general Common
Law of personal property or else rested upon statutes
of those colonies in which slavery existed. It may be
observed in passing that although one might think
that the recognition of the rights of man as man {i.e.
as a human being) would be clearest and fullest in a
country where there were no slaves, this may not in
fact have been the case. Where some men are free
and others are slaves, the status of freedom may have
been conceived more sharply as a positive status, and
the rights belonging to the individual as a freeman
may have stood out more strongly, because he is le-
gally exempt from treatment to which the slave is
liable. As a freeman, he is prima facie the equal, as a
holder of private civil rights, of all other free men, even
though the latter may belong to a specially pri\dleged
caste. The history of the Roman law of persons lends
colour to this view.

On no feature of the Common Law did your ancestors
lay more stress than on the jury, and the right of every
citizen to be tried by his peers. This right had been
a bulwark of English freedom, and was deemed in the
eighteenth century to be essential thereto. Yet it
deserves to be noticed that the jury was an institution
which, in the form familiar to us, arose almost by acci-
dent. The legal genius, or instinct, of the mediaeval
English may, however, be credited with the use they

DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 6i

made of this accident. Darwin has shown how a
variation from a type which in its origin is accidental,
that is to say, due to some cause operative in an in-
dividual organism which is beyond our power of en-
quiry (do we quite know what we mean when
we talk of chance ?) , may become the source of a new
type possessing advantages which enable it to survive
and prevail and reach a higher level of efficiency than
the original type possessed. So it may be not too
fanciful to suggest that where a political or legal germ
happens to fall in a fertile soil the virtue of the soil
enables it to spring up and become the parent of a
flourishing progeny. Our ancestors moulded the jury
into an instrument serviceable not only for discovering
the truth but for securing freedom and justice, freedom
because it was practically independent of royal power,
justice because, although it was sometimes intimi-
dated, and occasionally even corrupted, it was usually
less liable to be tampered with by those maUgn influences
which might poison the mind or pervert the action of a
judge in days when public opinion was ill-informed or
weak. We, in England, have no longer that confidence
in the wisdom of a jury in certain classes of civil ac-
tions which we once had, and the tendency of recent
years has been to narrow the sphere of its employment.
But the institution of the jury has had some notably
beneficent results. Along with those rules of pleading
to which I have already referred, it helped to form in
us a keener sense of the need for separating issues of

I"-

62 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

law from issues of fact than exists anywhere outside
England and America, and it has trained us how to
draw this distinction in every case we have to advise
on or to argue. It has tended to keep judicial deliver-
ances of the law within due limits of brevity, because
when a judge finds himself tempted to wander off from
a determination of legal points into the general
merits of the case, he is reminded that the latter are
for the jury, and that his natural human tendency to do
what he thinks substantial justice must be restrained
by the sense that his business is to declare the law and
be content with advising the jury on the facts. It
formed the practice of using, at a criminal trial, evidence '^\
almost exclusively oral, and thus incidentally it pre-
vented both those secret examinations of the accused
person and that recourse to torture which were com-
mon in Continental Europe. It confirmed the ancient
usage of requiring judicial proceedings to be conducted
in public, and thus kept subject to the watchful eye of
popular opinion. And it mitigated that harshness of
the penal law which belongs to all comparatively rude
societies and was not removed from the English statute
book till within the memory of persons still li^^ng.
When men were liable to be hanged for small thefts,
English juries refused to convict for such offences, and
their refusal hastened the march of legislative reform. I

The mention of penal matters suggests a word as to
the extreme technicality of the older Common Law,
Frequently as that technicality frustrated the doing of

i

DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 63

substantial justice in civil cases, it had its advantages
in criminal proceedings. Often a prisoner who did not
deserve a severe sentence — and no doubt sometimes
also a prisoner who did — ■ escaped on some technical
ground. The Common Law, which had (as already
remarked) the great merit of forbidding the use of
torture, abominably frequent in Continental Europe
and practised even in the free cantons of Switzerland
till near the end of the eighteenth century, had also
the merit of forming in the legal profession the feeling
that an accused person ought to have a fair run for
life or freedom. A sportsmanlike instinct grew up,
like that which gives the hunted deer "law" or a
fair start, or that which forbids certain tricks by
which a game at cricket might be won. A judge who
bullied a prisoner was condemned by professional opin-
ion. A prosecuting counsel who overstated his case or
betrayed a personal eagerness to convict the prisoner,
incurred the displeasure of his brethren and was sure
to hear of it afterwards, I have often been struck in
our criminal courts by the self-restraint which experi-
enced counsel impose on themselves when conducting
a case, as well as by the care which the judge takes to
let the prisoner have the benefit of every circumstance
in his favour. Here one feels the tradition of the Com-
mon Law, which insisted on protecting the individual
against the state. How different things are in some
parts of the European continent is known to you all.
It is partly because this good tradition has been so well

64 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

preserved that we have in England found that con-
victed prisoners need comparatively few opportunities
for raising points of law after the trial. The trial it-
self almost always secures for them whatever justice
requires, though of course there is a power of raising
for subsequent argument points reserved.^

The mediaeval Common Law has been charged mth
one serious defect, that of lacking elasticity and the
power of expansion. It halted at a certain point. It
refused to deal, or I should perhaps say, its machinery
proved incapable of dealing, with certain sets of cases,
and left them to be taken up by the crown acting
through the Lord Chancellor. I cannot stop to
enquire how far this was due to an excess of con-
servatism in our forefathers, how far to the circum-
stances of the time, which, while circumscribing the
action of the king through one set of machinery, left
him free to act through another. Anyhow, the result
was that the huge system which we call Equity grew
up side by side with the Common Law, remained dis-
tinct from it in England until the Judicature Act of
1873, and I believe remains, in some states and to some
extent, still distinct from it in the United States. In
a broad sense, however, although, speaking technically,
we distinguish Common Law from Equity, we may in-
clude Equity within the term Common Law, when we

* In the present session of Parliament (1907) an Act has been
passed providing for an appeal, under certain circumstances, in crim-
inal cases.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 65

use this latter term to distinguish the law of England
and America from the Roman law of the European
continent, or of Louisiana and Spanish America.
And it must not be forgotten that not only had
Equity become a thoroughly positive system and a
technical system by the time when the North
American colonies were founded, but also that it
had been largely influenced by the same historical
environment and had been moulded by the same
national tendencies as had governed the growth
of the law administered in the Common Law ■ courts.
How much of its own precision and certainty the older
system had given to the younger system may be seen
by whoever will compare English Equity with the civil
law of most European countries in the seventeenth
century.

I have kept to the last the most striking of all the
historical conditions which determined the character
of Anglo-American law. England (or rather Britain)
was an island. The influences which governed the
development of law in the European mainland reached
her in an attenuated form. The English people had
the chance of making a new start and of creating a
system of law for themselves, instead of merely adopting
or adapting the Roman jurisprudence, as did, at va-
rious times and in diverse ways, the French, the Span-
iards, the Germans, and (ultimately and indirectly)
nearly all modern peoples except those of English
stock. We must not indeed exaggerate the originality

66 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

of our law. It is not as original as that of Iceland would
probably have been, had Iceland gone on developing
the legal customs she had formed by the middle of the
thirteenth century. It is not original in the sense of
owing little or nothing to foreign sources, for a great
deal of law flowed from Roman fountains into the
English stream. When (according to Gervase of
Tilbury) the Lombard Vacarius taught the Roman
law in the reign of King Stephen at Oxford ^
this is among the very first traces we have of that
famous university — we cannot suppose that his hear-
ers were confined to those who wished to practise in
the ecclesiastical courts. In the next century we find
Bracton, one of our earliest legal writers, cop>ang freely
from the Roman law books, though he frequently also
contradicts them when English usage differed. In the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the ecclesiastical
chancellors who built up the system of Equity were
much influenced by Roman legal doctrines, dra^vn
largely through canonist channels. StiU the fact
remains that the law of England was a new creation,
not an adaptation of the law of the Empire. It has a
character and a quality which are all its own ; and its
free spirit and tendencies have always stood out in
marked contrast to the despotic spirit and tendencies
which France, Spain, and Germany inherited from the
imperial jurisprudence. To that jurisprudence it was,
during the Middle Ages and the centuries that followed,
as much superior in respect for freedom and in what

DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 67

may be called a popular flavour as it was inferior in
respect of the philosophic breadth and elegance of the
ancient sources on which that imperial jurisprudence
was founded. The use of the jury, the far larger
place assigned to oral evidence, the sharper separation
of issues of law from issues of fact, are among the
most salient points in which its distinctive and indi-
vidual quality appears.

I had intended to have given you a brief sketch of
the earlier history of the ancient Roman law for the
sake of showing how the characteristics of that great
rival system sprang from features in the national char-
acter of the Romans in their Republican days, not un-
like those which marked our ancestors. The Romans
too had a genius for law. Less imaginative, less artistic,
less acute in speculation, altogether less intellectually
versatile and alert than were the Greeks, they had a
greater capacity for building up and bringing to an al-
most finished and certainly unsurpassed perfection a
body of legal principles and rules. They possessed this
capacity in respect of gifts like those of our ancestors.
They realized clearly the rights of the individual as
against the state. They were conservative. They had
the power of self-control. They were filled with practi-
cal good sense. But this great subject is too great
to be dealt with at the end of an address, and I must
be content with recommending it to the attention of
those who are interested in these studies as throwing
much light upon the general tendencies which have

68 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

governed the growth of law. The best illustrations
of English legal history are to be found in Roman legal
history.

I have so far been speaking of the Common Law as
a product of the English intellect under certain pecul-
iar historical conditions. But if it was a result, it was
also a cause. It reacted powerfully upon the people
that made it. Just as the habit of physical or mental
exercise strengthens the body or the mind where na-
tive energy has made exercise enjoyable, so the Common
Law, once created, began to develop further and give
more definite form to those very qualities of the na-
tion whereto its own features were due. Under its in-
fluence the national mind became more and more per-
meated by the spirit of legality. It grew accustomed
to resist arbitrary power, but as it did this in defence
of prescriptive right, it did not lapse into revolutionary
ways. Thus there was formed the idea of a govern-
ment of limited powers, and the habit, when anyone
claimed obedience, of requiring him to show his title
to demand it. If it be asked why should not such a
conception of the legal character of all authority be-
long to, and arise in, every duly matured system of
law, the answer is that the case of England stood alone
in this respect, that the law came early to be recognized
as being something more than an expression of the will
of the monarch. It sprang partly out of the old cus-
toms, partly (and more as time went on) from an as-
sembly which was national, although not yet popular.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 69

It did not descend, as in Continental Europe, from an
ancient and foreign wisdom or authority. It was
English. It came not from above, but from all around.
In England, moreover, there were among the men
who knew and practised the law not a few persons of
independent social standing. They were largely the
lesser landholders and the younger sons or nephews
of some of the larger landholders, and so they formed
a link between the nobles and the middle classes. Un-
like the lawyers of France, those of England did not
generally depend on the Crown, and they were ready on
occasion to oppose it. Thus, although the people at
large knew little of the details of the law, the spirit of
independent legality was diffused through the nation,
and legality was not the docile servant of power as it
became in countries where both physical force and the
function of making or declaring the law were in the
hands of the executive ruler.

How great a part the conception of the legal rights
of the subject or citizen against the Crown or the state
power played in English and American history, is known
to you all, nor need I dwell on the capital impor-
tance for the whole political system of the United
States of that doctrine of limited powers which has
been so admirably worked out in your constitutions,
nor of that respect for a defined legal right which sup-
ports their provisions. The life of every nation rests
mainly on what may be called its fixed ideas, those
ideas which have become axioms in the mind of every

70 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

citizen. They are stronger than fundamental laws,
because it is they that give to fundamental laws their
strength. They are, as the poet says, " the hidden bases
of the hills." Now it was mainly by the Common Law
that these fixed and fundamental ideas were moulded,
whereon the constitutional freedom of America, as of
England, rests.

One hundred and thirty-one years have now passed
since the majestic current of the Common Law became
divided into two streams which have ever since flowed
in distinct channels. Water is naturally affected by
the rock over or the soil through which it flows, but
these two streams have hitherto preserved almost the
same tint and almost the same flavour. Many statutes
have been enacted in England since 1776, and many
more enacted here, but the character of the Common
Law remains essentially the same, and it forms the
same mental habits in those who study and practise it.
An American counsel in an English court, or an Eng-
lish counsel in an American court, feels himself in a
familiar atmosphere, and understands what is going
on, and why it is going on, because he is to the manner
born. You read and quote our law reports, though
they are nowadays too largely filled by decisions on
recent statutes ; we read and quote yours, though
embarrassed by the enormous quantity of the food (not
all of it equally nutritious) which you annuaUy present
to our appetite. In nothing, perhaps, does the sub-
stantial identity of the two branches of the old stock

i

DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 71

appear so much as in the doctrine and practice of the
law, for the fact that many new racial elements have
gone to the making of the American people causes in
this sphere very little difference. It is a bond of union
and of sympathy whose value can hardly be overrated.
An English visitor who has himself been trained to the
law can find few keener pleasures than that which my
friends, Lord Justice Kennedy, Sir Kenelm Digby, Sir
Frederick Pollock (together with your other English
legal visitors), and I enjoy in being here to-day among
so many eminent members of our own profession and in
seeing how influential and how respected a place that
profession holds, and has always held, in the United
States. It is a bond of sympathy not least because it
is a source of common pride. There is nothing of
which you and we may be more justly proud than that
our common forefathers reared this majestic fabric
which has given shelter to so many generations of men
and from which there have gone forth principles of
liberty by which the whole world has profited.

The law of a nation is not only the expression of its
character, but a main factor in its greatness. What
the bony skeleton is to the body, what her steel ribs
are to a ship, that to a State is its Law, holding all
the parts fitly joined together so that each may retain
its proper place and discharge its proper functions.
The Common Law has done this for you and for us
in such wise as to have helped to form the mind and
habits as well of the individual citizens as of the

72 UNIVERSITY AND fflSTORICAL ADDRESSES

whole nation. Parts of it these private citizens
cannot understand ; and when that is so they had
better not try, but be content to seek your professional
advice. But it is all their own. They can remould
it if they will. Where a system of law has been made
by the people and for the people, where it conforms to
their sentiments and breathes their spirit, it deserves
and receives the confidence of the people. So may it
ever be both in America and in England.

THE CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF
LEGISLATION

Address Delivered to the New York State Bar Association,
January, 1908.

THE CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF
LEGISLATION

Address Delivered to the New York State Bar Association,
January, 1908.

The subject on which I have to address you is far re-
moved from any of those thoughts with which the poHt-
ical and financial excitement of the moment fills the
thoughts of the legal practitioner either in the rural
parts of the State, or here in New York City, where
the financial barometer rises and falls so quickly, and
where the lawyer is often summoned to administer
spiritual consolation to some of his clients in the part
of the city where that barometer can best be watched.
But it may have some interest for an audience which
is not wholly absorbed in its professional practice, but
has also to watch and study the machinery of legisla-
tion as it is at work from year to year.

The immense increase in the volume of legislation
during the last half century is one of the salient fea-
tures of our time. Mr. Choate has told you that more
than five thousand statutes were passed in this country
during the last two years. But the phenomenon is
not confined to this country. Various causes may be
assigned for it. It may be due to the swift changes in
economic and social conditions which have called forth

75

76 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

new laws to deal with those facts. Pessimists may per-
haps ascribe it to the spread of new evils or the increase
of old evils which the State is always attempting by
one expedient after another to repress. I suppose this
is what Tacitus meant when he wrote " Corruptissima
republica pUtrimcB leges. ^^ Or the optimist may tell
us that it is an evidence of that reforming zeal which is
resolved to use the power of the State and the law for
extirpating ancient faults and trying to make every-
one happier. Which of these or of other possible ex-
planations is the true one, I will not stop to consider.
But the fact that the output of legislation has of late
been incomparably greater than in any previous age —
greater not only absolutely, but in proportion to the
population of the civilized nations — suggests a con-
sideration of the forms and methods of law-making as
a timely topic.

In no country, moreover, is the output of statutes
so large as in the United States, where, besides Congress,
forty-six ^ State legislatures are busily at work turning
out laws on all imaginable subjects, with a faith in the
power of law to bless mankind which few historians
or philosophers, and still fewer experienced lawyers,
will be found to share. Nevertheless, such faith is a
testimony to the hopefulness of your people, and no
one can wish that any people should ever be less hopeful.

In modern free countries, where laws are enacted
by representative assemblies, where the economic and

^Now (1913) forty-eight.

CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 77

social questions to be dealt with are generally similar,
and where the masses of the people are moved, broadly
speaking, by the. same impulses, the problem of how
to make legislation satisfactory in substance and in
form is virtually the same problem everywhere. Ac-
cordingly, the light which the experience of one country
affords is pretty sure to be useful to other countries.
These we call private acts. I will try to indicate
some points in which the experience of methods tried
in Britain may deserve to be studied by you.

In the United States your enactments are all of one
kind, be they Federal laws or State laws : all emanate
directly from the legislature, and all are discussed and
passed in the same way. In Great Britain we have
found it desirable to divide enactments into three
classes: First we have public general statutes passed
by Parliament. Secondly, we have enactments of
local or personal application affecting the rights of par-
ticular areas or men, or particular business undertak-
ings. Thirdly, we have enactments intended to be of
temporary application, or at any rate such as to require
amendment from time to time in order to adjust them
to changing conditions, so that they are really rather
in the nature of executive orders than to be classified
among permanent laws. Orders of this executive kind
are now made not directly by Parliament, but either by
the Crown in the Privy Council, upon some few mat-
ters that are still left within the ancient prerogative
of the Crown, or else under statutory powers entrusted

78 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

by Parliament either to the Crown in Council or to some
administrative department. (I believe that in France,
and in Germany also, such orders are not made by the
supreme legislature.) There is also a larger class of
rules or ordinances of a somewhat wider, though not
universal, application, which being of an administrative
nature require from time to time to be varied. Such
rules or ordinances are, in England, now usually made
by authorities to whom power in that behalf has been
specially delegated by Parliament. Some, including
those which affect the Crown colonies, are made by
the Crown in Council. These we call Orders in Council,
and they include a large number of ordinances made
for the government of the Crown Colonies which do
not possess self-government, being nearly all inhabited
by native populations not deemed qualified for its
exercise. Similar to these are the Rules or Regula-
tions dealing with administrative matters which are
issued by some of the administrative departments
for the guidance of officials and of local authorities,
under a power conferred in that behalf by Parliament.
These also require to be varied from time to time,
and are therefore not fitted to be dealt vnth by Par-
liament. With these one may class the rules relating to
legal procedure in the Courts, which are made by the
Rules Committee, consisting of Judges of the Supreme
Court of Judicature, and other representatives of the
legal profession, chosen for the purpose and acting
under a power given by statute. The advantage of

CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 79

this plan is that it enables us from time to time to
modify our legal procedure without the necessity of re-
ferring the matter to Parliament.

In this way there has been built up a large body of
what may be called subsidiary law. It has statutory
effectiveness, because all of it has been made under
the powers of some statute, although made not
directly by Parliament itself, but under delegated par-
liamentary authority. These subsidiary enactments
are published in volumes called " Statutory Rules and
Orders." They form a large collection quite distinct
from that of the statutes. Thus the dimensions of
our statute book have been kept down while the dele-
gation of legislative power has materially reduced the
labour of Parliament.

Let me now return to the second class, viz., acts
passed directly by Parliament but not of general appli-
cation. This class includes enactments which, though
they apply only to particular places or persons, and
are thus not parts of the general law, such as railway
acts, canal, gas and water, and electric lighting acts,
acts giving specific powers to municipalities, and so
forth. They are sharply distinguished from General
Public acts in the method by which they are passed.
They are brought in and read a first time by motion of
a member in the House (either Lords or Commons) and
upon a petition by private persons. Notices have to
be publicly given of them some two months before the
usual beginning of a parliamentary session in order to

8o UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

call the attention of all persons possibly interested.
They are advertised in the newspapers of such parts
of the country as they affect in order that every person
who desires to oppose them may have an opportunity
of entering a notice of opposition and being heard upon
it. When they are brought in they are examined by
officials called the Examiners of Standing Orders, who
see that they comply with the general rules which
Parliament has prescribed, and in particular that all
the regulations with regard to notices have been duly
observed. When they have passed the Examiners of
Standing Orders, being shown to have complied with all
the rules prescribed in that behalf, they are brought
up for second reading and usually pass that stage
without discussion or division.

If, however, a private bill raises some large question
of public interest, it may be opposed upon second
reading. For instance, if it proposes to take, for the
purpose of building a railroad, common land over
which a number of commoners have rights of pasture,
and to close paths which the public are entitled to use,
it is open to any member to give notice of opposition
and to propose its rejection on grounds of general pol-
icy. So again if it relates to electric power or light
and raises the question whether electricity shall be
supplied to a large area by a municipality or by a pri-
vate company, as happened recently when a large in-
dustrial corporation sought power from Parliament to
create an enormous power establishment to supply

CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 8 1

electricity to every part of London, then again that
question would be fully debated on second reading as
being a question of public policy on which ParHament
ought to pronounce, laying down a precedent for simi-
lar cases likely to arise thereafter. Such cases are,
however, uncommon, and most private bills are sent
as a matter of course to what we call a private bill
committee.

This body usually consists of four members, but
may be and, in the case of very important bills,
often is larger. The Chairman is always a man of
some parHamentary experience and business capacity.
We have a panel of senior members, from which the
Chairmen are taken, and they become by practice
expert and skilful in dealing with these matters.
All the members of such a committee make a dec-
laration that they have no private interest in the
matter dealt with by the bill, and they are required
to deal with it in a purely judicial spirit, on the basis
of the evidence presented and the arguments used by
the lawyers who represent each side, just as in a
Court of Justice. Party politics never comes into the
matter.

No one is permitted to address private solicitations to
the members of the committee with a view to influence
their decision. Even a member of the House privately
approaching or trying to induce any member of the com-
mittee to vote in a particular way on the bill, would be
considered to have transgressed the rules, and be severely

82 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

condemned by his fellow-members. In point of fact,
the thing does not happen. These private bill commit-
tees, whether they decide right or wrong, because they
sometimes err like other people, are always understood
to be impartial and honest. In that way the procedure
gives general satisfaction. Neither is there any class of
persons whose business it is to " lobby" and endeavour
to persuade members to vote for or against a measure.
The conduct of private bills is in the hands of a body
of regular practitioners who are called parliamentary
agents. They are often, but not always, attorneys
at law. They are an organized body who are subject
to discipline, bound by a code of rules, and obliged to
observe those rules just as strictly as any other kind
of legal practitioner.

Under this system all our railways, and such other
public undertakings as require statutory sanction, have
been constructed, and have had their legal powers from
time to time increased or varied. It has worked weU
in every respect but one. It has been costly, for where
a private bill is hotly contested, the fees paid to agents
and counsel sometimes mount up to huge sums. But
it has been administered not only with honesty, but
with seldom even a suspicion ; and it has relieved the
two Houses of a vast mass of troublesome detail by
leaving this work to judicial committees acting in a
judicial way. It has, moreover, the advantage of giv-
ing every private bill the certainty of being examined
on its merits, and its merits only. Being outside the

CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 83

struggle for life which goes on among public bills, sel-
dom encroaching on their time, and not having its
time encroached on by them, and being treated in a
different way, the pressure of public business does not
prevent a private bill (except in the rare cases where
a large public issue is raised) from being sent to and
considered by a committee, and, if it pass the committee,
being reported to the House and passed there in the
course of one session. The committee may reject a
bill, but cannot get rid of it quietly by omitting to
report. Finally, it relieves members of Parliament
from being obliged to spend time and toil in advocat-
ing or opposing bills affecting their constituencies, a
process in which more enmities may be incurred than
favour gained. Having, during twenty-seven years
spent in the House of Commons, represented two
great industrial communities, I can bear witness to
the enormous gain to a member in being free from
local interests and local pressure. I never had any
solicitation whatever to trouble me from any colleague
in regard to any private bill. It now and then, though
very rarely, happened that some constituent or group
of constituents wrote to me and said, "Such and such
a bill is pending in the House of Commons, or House
of Lords ; we are very much interested in it and should
be glad if you could help." I had always an answer
which was easy, and which had the further merit of
being entirely correct and true; namely, that I was not
permitted by the rules of the House of Commons to

84 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

endeavour to use any influence upon any member of
the committee which was considering that bill. The
most I could have done would have been to tell the
Chairman publicly, without any secrecy, that this was
a bill of great importance, in which some of my con-
stituents were interested, and to beg that it should
have the fullest and most careful attention from the
committee. But as for trying to exert any influence
either for or against its passing, I should have broken
our rules had I tried to do so.

No one who has not been a member of a legislative
body can know what a relief it is to be able to free one's
self from any solicitations of this kind.

I dwell upon this point in order to explain to you
how it is the British Parliament has been able to deal
with the great mass of local legislation imposed on it
by the principle that special statutory authority is
required for undertakings which involve the compul-
sory taking of land or the creation of what is practi-
cally a monopoly. But the rehef given to Parlia-
ment, important as it is, has been the least among the
merits of the system used. Its great service has been
to provide a method in which matters involving im-
mense pecuniary interests have been for many years
past so dealt with as to raise no suspicions of corrup-
tion or unfair personal favour. And now, leaving
unnoticed other details regarding these private bills,
let me pass on to the larger question of public gen-
eral legislation, which has most interest for you as

CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 85

lawyers though it suffers from the great amount of
time absorbed by local and personal bUls.

The quality of statute law may be considered in
respect : first, of its Form ; secondly, of its Substance.

As respects Form, you, as lawyers, know that a
statute ought to be clear, concise, consistent. Its
meaning should be evident, should be expressed in the
fewest possible words, should contain no clause con-
tradicting another or anything repugnant to any other
provision of the statute law, except of course to such
provisions as it is expressly intended to repeal.

To secure these merits three things are needed ; viz.,

(a) that a bill as introduced should be skilfully drafted,

(b) that pains should be taken to see that all
amendments made during its passage are also properly
drafted, and (c) that the wording is carefully revised
at the last stage and before the bill is enacted. Of
these objects the first is in Britain pretty weU secured
by the modern practice of having all government bills
prepared by the official draftsman, who is called the
Parliamentary Counsel. Nearly aU our important bills,
and indeed nearly all the biUs of a controversial char-
acter that pass, are biUs brought in by the government
of the day. A private member has now, owing to the
pressure of time, hardly any chance of passing legisla-
tion. Therefore, you may take it that all important
legislation is prepared, and pushed through, by the
government. The government has an official perma-
nent drafting staff, consisting of two or three able and

86 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

highly trained lawyers, whose business it is to put its
bills into the best shape. If they are not always perfect
in form, that may not be the fault of the draftsman, be-
cause the best scientific shape is not necessarily the
shape in which it is most easy to pass a bill through
Parliament. The form which is given to a bUl may
make some difference to the amount of opposition it
will excite, and a better drafted measure may either
rouse more antagonism or give greater opportunities for
attack than a less neatly or elegantly drafted one would
encounter, and also to afford the fewest opportunities for
taking divisions in committees. It is one of the rules
of our Parliament that every clause has to be separately
put to the vote in committee; therefore, the more
clauses, the more divisions, and the more divisions,
the more expenditure of time. Hence, if you put a
great deal of matter into one clause, subdividing it
into subsections, and parts of subsections, instead of
letting each part of the matter to be enacted have a
clause to itself, you have fewer debates on each clause
as a whole and fewer divisions. That may explain
peculiarities in the structure of recent British acts
which would otherwise excite surprise. It is hardly
possible that legislation, passed by a popular assembly,
should attain to that high standard of scientific per-
fection which could be obtained at Rome, where a
consul or a tribune put to the vote of the Assembly
a carefully prepared measure which could not be
amended, but had to be accepted or rejected as a

CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 87

whole. Neither could the work be so neatly done as
it was under an absolute monarch like the Roman
Emperor.

Our statute law has been greatly improved in
form since the office of Parliamentary draftsman was
created. He has sometimes functions to discharge that
require high skill and judgment. It often happens
that the minister who is preparing a measure has
not completely thought out all its provisions, and
may not, even if he be himself a lawyer, have in
his mind all the relations which the bill he de-
sires to enact will bear to various branches of a vast
and complicated system of law. The business of the
Parliamentary draftsman is not only to take the ideas
and plans of the minister and put them into the clearest
and most concise form, but also to warn the minister
of all the consequences his proposals will have upon
every part of the system, and to help him to consider
what is the best way in which the amendment in the
law it is sought to effect can be secured and expressed.
The Parliamentary draftsman has, of course, nothing
to do with questions of governmental policy and stands
entirely apart from party politics. He must serve every
administration with equal zeal and loyalty. But if he
personally is a man of real ability, who understands
public questions, has mastered the particular subject
he is asked to deal with, perceives its difl&culties and
sees how they can be met, he may give the most valu-
able assistance to the minister. All our ministers

88 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

gladly acknowledged what they owed to the late Sir
Henry Jenkyns, who long filled the post with consum-
mate ability, though few persons outside the narrow
circle of the higher civil service had ever heard his
name.

As respects amendments in committee and final
revision, our English procedure is not satisfactory.
There ought to be some means of correcting, before a
measure finally passes, those inelegancies, redundancies,
and ambiguities which the process of amending in com-
mittee usually causes. But as Parliament has, so far,
refused to allow any authority outside itself to alter
the wording in the smallest point, all that can be
done is to use the last stage of the bill to cure such
blemishes as can be discovered. Doubtless the same
difficulties arise here. I am not fully informed as to
how they are dealt with, but have learnt with great
interest of the efforts recently made in Wisconsin, under
the zealous initiative of Mr. McCarthy, and in New
York State also, to supply by a bureau of legislation
assistance to members of the legislature in the prepara-
tion of their bills. The value of this plan seems to have
been fully recognized in both States, and the example
has told upon five other States, w^here similar arrange-
ments are now made by State authorit}- for such help.
I venture hope that Congress will see its way to the
creation of some such office for drafting bills, so as to
provide ampler data for members and render to them
such legal help as they may require.

CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 89

Now let US come to the Substance of legislation, and
start from two propositions which everyone will
admit.

1. There is in all free countries a great demand for
legislation on all sorts of subjects, mainly due to the
changes in economic conditions and to the impatience
of reformers to have all sorts of evils dealt with
by law.

2. The difficulty of framing good laws is enormous,
because most countries are now occupied not merely
in the comparatively easy task of repealing old laws
which hampered the action of the citizens, — destruc-
tion is simple work, — • but in the far harder task of
creating a new set of laws which shall use the power of
the community to regulate society and secure the ends
which reformers and philanthropists desire. Eighty
years ago Europeans thought that the great thing was
to get freedom and abolish bad laws. When they had
got it they were dissatisfied, and instead of simply let-
ting everybody alone to work out his own weal or woe,
on individualist principles, they presently set to work
to forbid many things which had been previously
tolerated and to throw upon government all sorts of
new functions, more difficult and delicate than those
of which they had stripped it.

Whether the disposition to increase the range of
governmental action is right or wrong, I am not here
to discuss. The current is, at least for the moment,
irresistible, as appears from the fact that it prevails

90 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

alike in Continental Europe, in England, in the British
colonies and in the United States. The demand for
a profusion of legislation is inevitable; and the dif-
ficulty of having it good is undeniable. In what does
the difficulty consist ? In three things. First, of
those who demand legislation, many do not under-
stand what is the precise evil they desire to cure, the
precise good they seek to attain. They suffer from
discontent but cannot diagnose its cause. Secondly,
when they can trace the evil to its source they seldom
know what is the proper remedy ; those who agree as
to the end differ as to the means. Thirdly, the num-
ber of measures, remedial and constructive, called for
is so large that it is hard to select those most urgently
needed. No legislature can deal with all at once.
Where many are being urged at the same time by
different persons, they jostle one another, and like peo-
ple jammed together in the narrow exits of a theatre,
they move more slowly than if they were made to pass
along in some regular order.

It would be easy to suggest, if we were dra\\ang a
new constitution for a new community, an ideal method
of securing good legislation and securing it promptly.
But we have actual concrete constitutions and govern-
ments to deal with, so, instead of sketching ideals,
let me briefly describe the actual machinery pro-
vided in the United States and in Britain for passing
statutes. This machinery differs materially in the
two countries.

CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 91

The American plan starts from the principle that
the Legislative Department must be kept apart from
the Executive. Accordingly, the administration in the
National and in the State governments has neither
the responsibility for preparing and proposing measures
nor any legally provided means at its disposal for carry-
ing them through Congress, though the President and
the State governors can recommend them, and may
sometimes by an adroit use of their influence, or by
a forcible appeal to the people, secure the passing of a
bill. You rely on the zeal and wisdom of the mem-
bers of Congress to think out, devise, and prepare such
measures as the country needs ; on the committees of
your assemblies to revise and amend these measures ;
on the general sense of the assemblies and the judg-
ment of their presiding officers, or of a so-called "steer-
ing committee," to advance and pass those of most
consequence. But should there not happen to be any
member or group of members who does these things,
or who does them well, there wiU be nobody respon-
sible to the people for a failure to give them what
they need.

We, in England, have been led by degrees to an
opposite principle. The executive is with us primarily
responsible for legislation and, to use a colloquial ex-
pression, "runs the whole show," the selection of topics,
the gathering of information, the preparation of bills
and their piloting through Parliament.

I. The requisite information is collected by the de-

92 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

partment of government to which the subject belongs,
and frequently the way is paved for legislation by
means of Royal^ Commissions or Departmental Com-
mittees appointed to take evidence and report upon
topics of importance which need legislation.

II. When it comes to the actual introduction of a
measure, the work of determining its substance is done
by an administrative department of the government
and the drafting by the government draftsman already
referred to. The department supplies the matter of
the bill, the latter puts it into shape. Thus both prac-
tical knowledge of the subject and professional skill
for giving legal form to the measure to be enacted, are
secured. All the more important measures of each
session are brought in by the Ministry on their re-
sponsibility as leaders of the majority in the House
of Commons. The most important, including those
likely to raise party controversy, are considered by
the Cabinet, sometimes also by a Cabinet committee,
and sometimes at great length. I remember one case
in which an important bill was altered and reprinted
in twenty-two successive drafts, and another case in
which a large and controversial bill occupied prac-
tically the whole time of the Cabinet during six long
sittings.

Bills brought in by private members are drafted
by themselves, or by some lawyer whom they employ
for the purpose. Should a private member ask a Minis-
ter or a department for assistance, it would usually be

CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 93

given him, assuming that the department approved the
end in view.

III. Once the bill is launched, its fate depends on the
amount of intelligent care the Legislature is disposed to
give it and the amount of skill the Minister in charge
shows in steering the boat which carries its fortunes.
He has, of course, the assistance of the official drafts-
man and sometimes of one or more colleagues in pre-
paring his own amendments and considering those
proposed by others. He must try to get time enough
reserved for its passage, the disposal of time resting
with the government.

The practical result of our English system may be
summed up by saying that it secures four things :

(i) A careful study of the subject before a bill is
introduced.

(2) A decision by men of long political experience
which out of many subjects most need to be dealt with
by legislation.

(3) A careful preparation of measures, putting them
into the form in which they are most likely to pass.
That may not be always the best form, but there is no
use in offering to Parliament something too good for such
a world as the world of practical politics everywhere is.

(4) The fixing upon someone of responsibility for
dealing with every urgent question. Whenever an
evil has to be dealt with or a want supplied by the
action of the Legislature, there is never any doubt who
shall do it. The governm^ent has got not only to pro-

94

UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

pose something, but to put something through, the
Minister to whom it belongs having it in charge through
all its stages. A government which neglects to bring
in the measures urgently required, or fails through
weakness to pass them, sufifers in credit ; and if the
matter excites exceptional popular interest possibly
may be turned out either by an adverse vote in the
House of Commons, or by the people at the next
general election.

There are some defects in the English system of
Parliamentary legislation, but I need not here refer to
them, for they do not affect the points I have been
stating, but arise from other features of our govern-
ment. The points to be specially emphasized for your
consideration are that we provide adequate machinery
for the preparation of measures, and that we make a
small group of persons, the Cabinet, responsible for
bringing them in and pushing them. This fixing of
definite responsibility is perhaps the chief merit of the
system.

The Cabinet is responsible because it is really a
working committee of the majority of the House of
Commons, which is itself directly chosen by the
people. The business of the majority is to support
the Administration, because it leads them, and enjoy-
ing their confidence, presumably enjoys that of the
majority of the nation. If the majority ^^dthd^aw their
confidence, the Administration falls.

In France the method of legislation stands half-

CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 95

way between the American and the English methods.
The Ministry studies a subject, prepares a bill dealing
with it, and launches the bill into the Chamber,
There, the bill passes into the hands of a committee
which amends and perhaps quite remoulds it, then
returning it to the Chamber with an elaborate report.
In the Chamber it is in charge, not of the Minister
who proposed it, but of the committee reporter, the
Ministry having no more power over its fortunes than
flows from the fact that they are the leaders of the
majority and can speak in its support. There are
also many bills brought in by private members ; and
these also go to the committees and have apparently
a better chance than the bills of private members
have in England.

Switzerland, like the United States, but unlike France,
has no Ministers as voting members of either Cham-
ber, but the members of the Administration, which con-
sists of seven persons elected by the Legislature, are
allowed to speak and defend their policy or to advo-
cate a measure in either the National Council or
the Senate.

Both these intermediate systems lose something of
the momentum which the responsibility of government
for legislation gives in England, but they also reduce
the merely party opposition which it has to encounter,
while they give to the preparation and passing of meas-
ures the advantage of the cooperation of those whose
administrative experience enables them to perceive

96 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

what is really wanted and to judge how it had best be
attained.

Whether it is possible to establish in this country,
consistently with the provisions of the Federal and the
State Constitutions, any scheme by which the Execu-
tive can be rendered more helpful to the Legislature or
by which Legislatures can be organized with a more
authoritative leadership, and can more completely
supervise the Administration, — this is a question which
well deserves your consideration. Scientific method,
which has been applied to everything else, needs
in our time to be applied more fully and sedulously
to the details of constitutional and political organi-
zation than has been anywhere yet done. How-
ever, if one may judge from the recent action of
your States, there are certain changes already in
progress. The sittings of Legislatures have been made
less frequent and shorter ; and as sessions grow shorter
State Constitutions grow longer. Not only many
subjects, but even many minor details of legislation,
have been withdrawn from the Legislature by being
placed in the State Constitution, which the Legislature
cannot change. Direct legislation by the people finds
increasing favour. Some reformers demand power for
Congress to deal with topics which formerly were left
entirely to the State. There is talk of amending the
Federal Constitution.

Now let me try to illustrate how scientific method
may be applied to the constructive part of legislation

CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 97

and the arrangements of Legislatures. It may be
applied to the collection of data. The facts on which
laws ought to be based need to be gathered, sifted,
critically examined. When studying the experiments
made in other countries, not merely the text of the laws
but their practical working also needs to be studied.

Take such subjects as the tariff and the law of cor-
porations. Although in no other country have cor-
porations raised such large and difficult problems as
their growth has created here, other countries have,
like you, been obliged to keep them under some con-
trol, and to prevent them from establishing oppressive
monopolies. Everyone, except the monopolist, wishes
to check or expunge monopolies, but nobody wants to
substitute a meddling ofi&cialism. How to steer be-
tween these two evils is no easy problem, and needs
careful enquiry, with an examination of the laws of
other countries.

Wherever there exists a system of customs duties
meant to protect domestic industries, it becomes neces-
sary to ascertain how each duty, whether on raw
materials or on the manufactured article, operates
upon the manufacturer, the dealer, the consumer ; and
the more complex and all-embracing a tariff is, so
much the greater is this need. Both these subjects
are beyond the knowledge and the skill of the ordinary
legislator in any country. They need special study by
persons of exceptional knowledge. The same thing
holds true of railroads, of mines, of factories, of sanita-

98 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

tion, of irrigation, of forest conservation, and many
other topics of current interest. All must be ap-
proached in a scientific way, using the results of the
experience of other countries.

Methods, too, have to be studied as well as facts.
To devise and apply sound methods of legislation is
equally a matter requiring careful study and a knowl-
edge of the systems which have succeeded elsewhere.
I have ventured to suggest to you that the British
system deserves your study in two points. One
touches the distinction to be drawn between the work
proper to a supreme legislative body, and that which
is better left to some administrative or judicial author-
ity, making rules under a power delegated by the Legis-
lature. Another relates to the still more important
distinction between bills relating to local and personal
matters and those which designed to affect the general
law of the land. The more these local matters in
which the pecuniary interests of persons or corpora-
tions are involved can be kept apart from politics, the
better. They are usually fitter for a sort of investiga-
tion, judicial in its form, though not necessarily con-
ducted by lawyers. To take them out of the ordinary
business of a legislature saves legislative time, while it
removes temptation. It sets the members of a legisla-
tive body free to deal with the really important general
issues affecting the welfare of the people which are
now crowding upon them. It helps them to appeal to
the people upon those general issues rather than in

CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 99

respect of what each member may have done for the
locahty he represents. Many of your statesmen have
told me that in those States where dissatisfaction with
the conduct of legislatures is expressed, that disap-
proval is chiefly due to their handling of local and
personal bills.

Let me sum up in a few propositions, generally appli-
cable to modern free nations, the views which I have
sought to bring before you.

I. The demand for legislation has increased and is
increasing both here and in all civilized countries.

II. The task of legislation becomes more and more
difficult, o^v^dng to the complexity of modern civiliza-
tion, the vast scale of modern industry and commerce,
the growth of new modes of production and distribution
that need to be regulated, yet so regulated as not to
interfere with the free play of individual enterprise.

III. Many of the problems which legislation now
presents are too hard for the average members of legis-
lative bodies, however high their personal ability, be-
cause they cannot be mastered without special knowl-
edge. (It may be added that in the United States a
further difficulty arises from the fact that legal skill is
often required to avoid transgressing some provision
of the Federal or a State Constitution.)

IV. The above conditions make it desirable to have
some organized system for the gathering and examina-
tion of materials for legislation, and especially for
collecting, digesting, and making available for easy

lOO UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

reference the laws passed in other countries on subjects
of current importance and an account of the results
obtained thereby.

V. In order to secure the pushing forward of meas-
ures needed in the public interest, there should be in
every Legislature arrangements by which some definite
person or body of persons becomes responsible for the
conduct of legislation.

VI. Every Legislature has in our days more work
thrown on it than it can find time to handle properly.
In order, therefore, to secure sufficient time for the
consideration of measures of general and permanent
applicability, such matters as those relating to the de-
tails of administration or in the nature of executive
orders should be left to be dealt with by the adminis-
trative department of government, under delegated
powers, possibly with a right reserved to the Legisla-
ture to disapprove regulations or orders so made.

VII. Similarly, the more detailed rules of legal pro-
cedure ought to be left to the judicial department or
some body commissioned by it, instead of being regu-
lated by statute.

VIII. Bills of a local or personal nature ought to be
separated from bills of general application and dealt
with in a different and quasi- judicial way.

IX. Arrangements ought to be made, as, for in-
stance, by the creation of a drafting department con-
nected with a Legislature or its chief committees, for
the putting into proper legal form of all bills introduced.

J

CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION loi

X. Similarly, a method should be provided for recti-
fjdng in bills at the latest stage before they pass into
law such errors in drafting as may have crept into them
during their passage.

XI. When any bill of an experimental kind has been
passed, its workings should be carefully watched and
periodically reported on as respects both the extent
to which it is actually enforced (or found enforcible)
and the practical results of the enforcement. A de-
partment charged with the enforcement of any act
would naturally be the proper authority to report.

XII. In order to enable both the Legislature and
the people to learn what the statute law in force actually
is, and thereby to facilitate good legislation, the statute
law ought to be periodically revised, and as far as pos-
sible so consolidated as to be brought into a compact,
consistent, and intelligible shape.

I venture to submit these general observations be-
cause to-day there is everywhere an unusual ferment
over economic and social questions and a loud de-
mand for aU sorts of remedies, some of them crude,
some useless, some few possibly pernicious. Here, in
the United States, this ferment takes a form conditioned
by your constitutional arrangements and your political
habits. There seems to be in many quarters a belief
that the State governments cannot deal with some of
the large questions that interest the whole country.
Yet there is also a fear to disturb the existing balance
of powers and functions between the State authorities

I02 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

and the National government. There is a feehng that
evils exist which governments ought to deal mth, and for
dealing with which the existing powers of governments
ought to be extended. Yet there is also a reluctance
to multiply officials and a dread of anything approach-
ing the bureaucratic paternalism of Continental Eu-
rope. We are hovering between discontent and doubt.
The reforming spirit runs so strong that it would sweep
off their feet any people which had not, as you have,
become attached to their old institutions. So, again,
there is a disposition to criticize State governments and
city governments, and to appeal to good citizens, as
voicing the best public opinion, to step in and do by
voluntary organizations whatever useful work those
governments are failing to do. But how is public opin-
ion to be organized, concentrated, f ocussed ? WTio are
the persons to give it that definite and authoritative
expression, directed to concrete remedies, which will
enable it to prevail ? These are some of the problems
which appear to be occupying your minds, as, under
different forms, they occupy us in Europe. They ^^dll,
doubtless, like other problems in the past which were
even harder, be all solved in good time, solved all the
better because there is, here in America, little of that
passion which has at other times or in other countries
overborne the voice of reason.

Meantime, as there is evidently a good deal of legis-
lation before you, every improvement in the machinery
of legislation and the conditions of legislation that can

CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 103

be made is worth making, every light that the ex-
perience of other countries can suggest is worth
receiving and using.

I once listened to an address on Improvements needed
in Modern Education, delivered by an eminent man of
science. He began by proving to us that those of his
scientific brethren who assigned to our earth a life of
only three or four million years were entirely mistaken,
for there was every reason to believe it would last
twice or thrice that length of time. From this he
drew the conclusion that it really was worth while,
with this long future before us, to attempt fundamental
reforms in our educational system. We who heard him
thought that even with only a few thousands of years to
look forward to, reforms would be worth making. So
to you I will say that without venturing to look even
thousands of years ahead, there is before us such a
prospect of an increasing demand for legislation that it
is weU worth while to secure by every possible device
the efiiciency of our legislative machinery.

The great profession to which you belong has a
special caU to exert in this direction its influence, which
has often been exerted for the benefit of the nation.
You know such weak points as there may be in the
existing legislative machinery. You know them as
practical men who can apply practical remedies. If
you see a public benefit in separating different classes
of bills and treating the special, or local and personal,
biUs in a different way from the public ones, you can

I04 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

best judge how this should be done. You have daily
experience of the trouble which arises from obscurities
or inconsistencies in the statutes passed, of the waste-
ful litigation due to the uncertainty of the law, with
all the expense and vexation which follow. You are,
I hear on all hands, not satisfied with the criminal pro-
cedure in many of your States. These are matters
within your professional knowledge. You can, with
the authority of experts, recommend measures 3^ou
deem good, and remonstrate against those that threaten
mischief ; and I understand that remonstrances pro-
ceeding from the Bar are frequently effective.

Some C3mical critics have suggested that the legal
profession regard with equanimity defects in the law
which may increase the volume of law suits. The tiger,
it is said, cannot be expected to join in clearing away
the jungle. This unappreciative view finds httle sup-
port in facts. Allowing for the natural conservatism
which the habit of using technical rules induces in
lawyers, and which may sometimes make them over-
cautious in judging proposals of change, they have,
both here and in England, borne a creditable part in
the amendment of the law. It is a mistake to think
they profit by its defects. Where it is clear and definite,
where legal procedure is prompt and not too costly,
men are far more ready to resort to the Courts for the
settlement of their disputes. It is the prospect of un-
certainty, delay, and expense that leads them to pocket
up their wrongs and endure their losses. Even, there-

^

i

CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 105

fore, on the lower ground of self-interest, the Bar
(except perhaps a few of its least desirable members)
does not gain by a defective state of the law. But
apart from this, every man who feels the dignity of his
profession, who pursues it as a science, who realizes
that those whose function it is thoroughly to under-
stand and honestly to apply the law, are, if one may
use the somewhat highflown phrase of a great Roman
jurist, the Priests of Justice, — every such man will
wish to see the law made as perfect as it can be. So,
too, whoever realizes, as in the practice of your pro-
fession you must daily do, how greatly the welfare of
the people depends on the clearness, the precision, and
the substantial justice of the law, will gladly contribute
his knowledge and his influence to furthering so excel-
lent a work. There is no nobler calling than ours,
when it is pursued in a worthy spirit.

Your profession has had a great share in moulding
the institutions of the United States. Many of the
most famous Presidents and Ministers and leaders in
Congress have been lawyers. It must always hold a
leading place in such a government as yours. You
possess opportunities beyond any other section of the
community for forming and guiding and enlightening
the community in all that appertains to legislation.
Tocqueville said eighty years ago : " The profession of
the law serves as a counterpoise to democracy." We
should to-day be more inclined to say that after having
given to democracy its legal framework, it keeps that

io6 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

framework in working order by elucidating the prin-
ciples which the people have laid down in constitutions.
To you, therefore, as an organized body of lawyers, one
may fitly address these observations on legislative
methods drawn from the experience of Europe. We live
in critical times, when the best way of averting hasty
or possibly even revolutionary changes is to be found
in the speedy application of remedial measures. Both
here and in Europe improvements in the methods of
legislation will not only enable the will of the people
to be more adequately expressed, but will help that
will to express itself with temperance and wisdom.

What is legislation but an effort of the people to pro-
mote their common welfare ? What is a Legislature but
a body of men chosen to make and supervise the work-
ing of the rules framed for that purpose ? No country
has ever been able to fill its legislatures with its wisest
men, but every country may at least enable them to
apply the best methods, and provide them with the
amplest materials.

The omens are favourable.

Never, I think, since the close of the Ci\al War, has
there been among the best citizens of the United States
so active a public spirit, so warm and pervasive a de-
sire to make progress in removing all such e\als as
legislation can touch. Never were the best men, both
in your legislatures and in the highest executive posts,
more sure of sympathy and support in their labours
for the common weal.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: THIRD PRESIDENT
OF THE UNITED STATES AND FOUNDER
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

Delivered at the University of Virginia on Founder's Day,
April 13, 1908.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: THIRD PRESIDENT
OF THE UNITED STATES AND FOUNDER
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

Delivered at the University of Virginia on Founder's Day,
April 13, 1908.

No one can stand here vdthout thinking much and
wishing to say much about Thomas Jefferson, the
founder of this famous University, and next to George
Washington one of the two or three most remarkable
men that Virginia has given to the United States and
to the world. Yet I must refrain from attempting
to describe his striking personahty. Not that there is
anything to deter me personally or officially from
attempting the task. To-day nothing need prevent the
representative of the great grandson of King George the
Third from paying a tribute to the gifts and the achieve-
ments of the draftsman of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence. Nor ought I forget, in this connection, to
remind you that Jefferson was in his later days the dis-
interested advocate of the most friendly relations with
England, the policy of which he had so often opposed.
But hours, rather than the few minutes at my disposal,
would be needed to do justice to a character so varied
and so complex, to a career connected v^ith so many
great events and entangled into the web of so many

109

no UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

personal and political controversies. Moreover, in
painting the portrait it would not be right to give the
lights without giving also the shadows ; and this is not
the place in which one could bring oneself to speak any-
thing but praise of the illustrious founder of an illustri-
ous institution.

It is easy to pick holes in the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, and to decry, as one of your own distinguished
men did, its "glittering generalities." But under the
rhetoric and the overbold and overbroad assertions of
doctrine it contains, there is a condensed and concen-
trated force which few documents have equalled, and
which accounts for the immense power it has exerted.
There is, however, I may say, one matter on which all
are agreed whether or no they approve the principles and
the doings of Jefferson. He was a man of a wonderfully
vigorous and many-sided activity. Scarcely a subject
of enquiry lay outside of the range of his versatile in-
tellect. Whether you like him or not, you cannot help
being attracted by him. Whether you think his in-
fluence on American politics and thought to have been
in the main wholesome or pernicious, you must admit
that influence to have been pervading and permanent.
How far it is still a really effective influence, now that
the conditions of the United States have become so dif-
ferent from those which surrounded him, I will not
attempt to determine. His writings are no longer
widely read ; his name is more often on the lips than
are his ideas fresh in the recollection of those who pro-

THOMAS JEFFERSON ill

fess themselves his disciples and seek to conjure with his
authority. But that men should still call themselves
his disciples and should, nearly a century after his
death, claim to be maintaining his traditions, is a re-
markable tribute to his gifts, and a remarkable evidence
of the power he exerted in his own time upon the great
party that still looks back to him as its founder.

He had a lively interest not only in human affairs
but also in all matters of natural history, an interest
which sometimes led him into odd hypotheses, as when
he conjectured that the bareness of the Western prairies
which were being explored in his day was due to the
action of the mastodons, — the remains of those pri-
meval monsters had been recently discovered — who
had devoured all the trees. But this sort of interest
strikes us as being all the more remarkable because he
was in a notable degree a man of the eighteenth century.
His whole way of thinking is unlike our way of to-day,
and we might say that compared with such contempo-
raries as Bentham, Burke, Alexander Hamilton, and still
more if he be compared with such much younger con-
temporaries as Goethe and Coleridge, Jefferson is
almost archaic. Yet having a bright, keen, inventive
mind, which played freely round many subjects, he
was sometimes in advance of his time, and hit upon
ideas characteristically modern.

Of all Jefferson's ideas and projects none lay nearer
to his heart and none deserve such unqualified praise
as his faith in education and his efforts to diffuse it.

112 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

He desired to establish in Virginia a scheme of general
elementary instruction and to create therewith a
system of upper secondary schools corresponding
broadly to the grammar schools of England, though
with a less purely classical curriculum, and then to
complete the fabric by a University whose aims should
be commensurate with all human knowledge and
which should recognize, both in the variety of its
studies and in the range of choice allowed among
those studies, as well as in the absence of ecclesiastical
control and even of coercive discipline, those prin-
ciples of liberty which he held so dear.

It was a fine and fertile conception. It does all the
more credit to Jefferson because nearly all the col-
leges of the United States were in those days classical
or mathematical academies attached to particular
denominations and with a narrow range of subjects,
drilling their pupils thoroughly, but drilling them on
old-fashioned methods. Ardently interested in aU
sorts of studies, natural as well as civil or humanistic,
Jefferson desired a University which should take, as
Bacon said, all knowledge to be its province, and should
provide instruction in every subject that men sought
to study. This view of a university — the old true
view of those early Middle Ages when universities
first arose but when there were few subjects to study
— had been almost forgotten. We are so familiar
with it now that we scarcely realize how novel it
was when propounded by Jefferson, and how much

THOMAS JEFFERSON 1 13

it transcended the common notions of his own times
when, in England, Oxford and Cambridge were just
beginning to awake from their long torpor, days during
which it had been left to the Universities of Scotland
to keep ablaze the sacred torch in Britain. Jefferson
lit the torch afresh in the South. In 1779 he tried to
secure a scheme for establishing popular education. In
1794 he sought to transfer bodily to Virginia the whole
faculty of the University of Geneva, threatened by the
progress of the Revolution in France, a really brilliant
idea, which ought to have been carried out, for the gain
to America would at that time have been greater than
the loss to Geneva. Never thereafter did he desist from
his efforts, till in 181 9 the Legislature passed an act,
which, while providing primary schools, crowned the
edifice by making an appropriation for the University
of Virginia. You remember his own words, "Our
University, the last of my mortal cares and the last
service I can render to my country."

Jefferson carried further than any other man of equal
abUity and equally large practical experience has done,
for we need not place in the category of practical men
the contemporary visionaries of France, a faith in the
poHticial perfectibility of mankind. He believed, or at
least he frequently declared, because we cannot be sure
that all he said represented his permanent convictions,
that the greatest evil from which men suffered was the
control of other men. He liked to call that control
Tyranny, but the language he sometimes used was ap-

114 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

plicable not merely to a despotic and irresponsible power
but to many other kinds of authority. He would appear
to have thought that liberty was so much the best thing
in the world that with enough of it all human affairs
would go well, and he so heartily distrusted authority
as to conceive that insurrections were needed every now
and then to check the misdeeds of rulers.

When one reads Jefferson's writings and examines
his conduct, considering on the one hand his faith in
the people, the average uninstructed people, of his
day, and on the other hand his high sense of the value
of knowledge and his constant efforts to spread uni-
versity instruction, three questions present themselves
to our minds — ■ questions of permanent interest for
all students of politics.

The first of these questions is. How far is it true
that the people are sure to go right ? As you here would
express it in familiar terms. Is the average man —
the farmer or the artisan — "fit to run a democracy" ?
He is always being told so on public platforms. But is
he really so ? and do those who tell him so always believe
what they say ? If freedom alone is enough to enable a
people to govern themselves weU, that is to say, if the
impulses of man are preponderatingly good, if the masses
may be trusted to know their own true interest, and
to select the proper means to secure it, the average man
ought to be able to do so. Yet Jefferson evidently had
his misgivings. Though he refrained from the condem-
nation which he ought to have passed on the excesses

THOMAS JEFFERSON 115

committed by some of his French Revolutionary friends,
he knew well enough that a great deal more than the
abolition of monarchy and "aristocracy" was needed to
secure good government ; and his own experience in
office was amply sufficient to show him how many knots
there are that the "average man" cannot untie.

This question is so large that I must not attempt to
discuss it here. I am content to commend it to your
reflection as one of the most momentous and funda-
mental questions of politics that has ever occupied
men's minds. We are always getting fresh light upon
it every year, and from every part of the world where
power has been placed in the hands of the multitude.
It has appeared in a somewhat new form in the exten-
sion which men seek to give to the principle of direct
legislation by the institutions of the Initiative and the
Referendum. The amount of truth contained in
Jefferson's sanguine view of human nature is really the
basic problem of all politics and of aU government,
which men are continually trying to solve, and no
doubt we have advanced further towards a knowledge
of its conditions than had the founders of your republic
and of the French Republic of those days, for the world
has had a much ampler experience of popular govern-
ments, or at least of governments claiming to be popular.
That experience ranges downward from republics so
well governed as Switzerland and the Orange Free
State to republics of the class to which Nicaragua and
Hayti belong.

Ii6 UNIVERSITY AND fflSTORICAL ADDRESSES

A second question suggested by Jefferson's ideas and
efforts is this : What ought to be, and what has usually
been, the effect of education on the highly educated
man so far as politics are concerned ? Have knowledge
and training been found to give him a deeper sympathy
with the people and a greater fitness for leading the
people, or do they rather cut him off from the masses,
making him detached, perhaps supercihous, possibly
even scornful or cynical ?

The question I put to you is not that which is often
debated in Europe, though seldom here, whether the
masses of the people on the one hand, or the wealthier
and educated class on the other, are more generally
likely to be right — that is, to be shewn by the result
to have been right — in their attitude on poUtical ques-
tions. It is rather this question : What is the effect
of the highest education, coupled with superior intel-
lectual gifts, on a man's political attitude and ten-
dencies ? Will it tend to increase or to reduce his faith
in popular government ?

You may say that this will depend upon his tempera-
ment, whether he is hopeful and buoyant, or timid and
despondent. No doubt temperament, which itself de-
pends largely on physical health, does make a difference.
But the average of cheerful and gloomy temperaments,
or of bad and good digestions, is pretty much the same in
the best educated and the least educated classes, so the
element of temperamental difference may be eliminated.

Instead of trying to discover a priori what sort of

THOMAS JEFFERSON 1 17

influence high intellectual capacity and a store of knowl-
edge might be expected to have on a man's political
tendencies, let us see what has in fact been the attitude
of such gifted men towards the politics of their own
countries. We shall find plenty of instances on both
sides. If you take those republics of antiquity which
the contemporaries of Jefferson were so fond of talking
about, you will find some great thinkers on the side
of democracy and some against it. This happened also
in modern Europe. In England, for instance, Milton,
Locke, Addison, Adam Smith, Bentham, Romilly,
Mackintosh, were in their days more or less on the popu-
lar or reforming side, while Hobbes, Swift, Bolingbroke,
David Hume, Samuel Johnson, were on the other.
Some great men, such as Burke, Coleridge, and Words-
worth began in the one camp and ended in the other,
altering their position as life went on under what people
caU the teaching of events.

Is there then no general principle to be discovered
affecting the attitude or sympathies of leading thinkers,
and are they divided between Liberals and Conserva-
tives just like other men ?

Let me suggest to you such a principle, the hint of
which comes to me from what we have seen happen in
Europe during the last fifty years.

Fifty years ago there were in Continental Europe
no free governments except in some small States,
Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, and the Scandinavian
countries. In some countries, such as Russia, Austria,

Ii8 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

the whole of Italy, except Piedmont, and to some ex-
tent in France under Louis Napoleon's sway, there ex-
isted not only arbitrary rule but an administration which
was oppressive and generally inefficient. In Prussia,
and some other German states, the administration
was good, but the people had little influence upon it.
Now, in all these countries at that time the great
majority of superior minds were strongly Uberal.
They saw the evils of the existing system more clearly
than did other men in their own rank of life; and
whether or no they suffered personally from misgovem-
ment, they were disgusted by it and anxious to over-
throw it.

To-day in Continental Europe the position is dif-
ferent. I will not attempt to decide to which side the
preponderance of men distinguished in literature and
science belongs. Many might be named as conspicu-
ous on each side. But such men, taken as a whole,
are more generally conservative in temper, and less
heartily democratic in opinion, than men of the
same type were in 1858. Why is this? Because
the facts are different. The liberty formerly sought
has, in most European countries, now been attained,
while the administrative evils which then excited
indignation have now been largely removed. Experi-
ence has, moreover, disclosed evils incident to some
forms of popular government which were not and
could not have been felt while arbitrary government
held the field, and because demands are now made

!

THOMAS JEFFERSON 119

in the name of liberty for further changes, poHtical or
economical, which many deem to be dangerous. De-
mocracy has not brought with it all the benefits that
were expected, so there has been a certain revulsion of
feeling against democratic government. Many of the
most powerful minds are occupied in trying not to
broaden and deepen its channel, but to erect barriers that
may check or guide its flow. But if arbitrary govern-
ment were in any country to gain once more the upper
hand, a thing very improbable (so far as we can look
forward) either here or in western Europe, no doubt
there would, among the thinkers in such a country, be
as strong a tendency away from it back toward popular
government as there was fifty years ago.

History will supply you with many other instances
to illustrate this law of a reaction of great thinkers
against the tendencies of their own time. Plato's
criticism of the Athenian democracy is the most
familiar instance. The explanation is simple enough.
Penetrating minds see the causes of the evils that exist
around them more clearly than other men do, and ardent
minds have a stronger impulse to sweep away those evils.
Men of imagination have a finer vision of what the world
might be, and incline to condemn what exists because
they believe in the possibility of something better.
Whatever the actually existing institutions may be, they
see the faults of those institutions. They despise the
catchwords of a dominant party, they see the hollowness
of current prejudices and the weakness of many a cur-

120 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

rent theory; they condemn the tendency to push a prin-
ciple to extremes, and the intoxication Vvdth its own power
which sometimes seizes upon the multitude. The same
tendency that makes the great thinker in an age of
despotism an advocate of popular government may make
him conservative in an age when popular government
seems to him to be in danger of going too fast or too far.
So we may say, speaking broadly, that the philosopher
and the idealist tend to be in opposition to the prevalent
tendencies of their own time, be those tendencies what
they may. Such men are apt to be in the minority.
One might almost say that they belong rather to the
future (or perhaps, like Dante, to an idealized past) than
to the present ; because it is they who are most exempt
from the habit of blind obedience and the sway of
custom, and are least inclined to acquiesce in what
exists merely because it exists.

The moral of this is — a moral fit to be stated and
reiterated and emphasized in a University — that
no one must ever be afraid of being in a minority.
Where at any rate the question is not of immediate
action in a matter lying within the competence of the
average man, for in such things the average man may
fairly claim to prevail, but a question requirmg wide
knowledge or serious and independent thought, he
who is in a minority is at least as likely to be right as
he who is in a majority. The majority must no doubt
prevail, for no means has been discovered of weighing
as well as counting votes. But to prevail and to be

THOMAS JEFFERSON 121

right are not the same thing; and in a democracy
men must never be dissuaded, because they have been
out-voted, from continuing to assert their convictions.
Obey the majority while they are the majority, but
do not for a moment suppose that because they are the
majority they are right.

Thus the finest kind of mind may be, according to
the circumstances of his time, either a liberal or a
conservative, a man who cries "Forward" or a man who
cries "Walk warily." But he will usually be one who
rises above the passions and prejudices of the moment,
who refuses to follow the crowd, who is not moved by
popular cries. It is well that this should be so, —
provided always that the detachment of the indepen-
dent thinker does not go so far as to put him out of
touch with the sentiment of his country and so prevent
him from serving it. The great thinker who tries to
be also a good citizen will have enough sympathy with
his fellow-men to see that he must adapt his counsels
to their needs, and must, instead of soaring above
them, place himself on their level, and speak to them
in a language they can understand. He ought to be
independent; he must not stand apart in isolation.

This brings me to the third question, which a reflec-
tion upon Jefferson and his faith in university education
suggests. What should a university do for its students
in the way of fitting them for a life of learning or a life
of public service ? That it should give them knowledge
is obvious enough. But it should also give them what

122 UNIVERSITY AND mSTORICAL ADDRESSES

is even better than knowledge ; that is, Wisdom, — by
which I mean the power to apply an intelligent criti-
cism to facts and ideas, to look at things all round, to
know how to get principles out of facts, and to test
the worth of ideas by their conformity to facts.

It should also teach them public spirit and the love
of truth.

Public spirit is often spoken of as a moral virtue.
That it is, — but it is a virtue which intellectual
training may help to form. The function of Philosophy
and History is so to enlarge our minds that we may
see how each man's highest interest, conceived in its
true moral aspect, is bound up \vith the pubHc weal,
and how nations and states prosper or decline just
in proportion as the public interest prevails in
their government or as that interest is allowed to
be overborne by the selfish interest of classes or of
individuals.

Still more evidently is it the duty of a university to
instil a devotion to truth. Knowledge and wisdom
and practical shrewdness, a sense of how to adapt
means to ends, are needed in all the walks of life any
one may have to tread. But in whatever work is
to be done for the permanent benefit of mankind, be
it for learning or science, be it for theology or poli-
tics; and also for all the higher kinds of practical
achievement that the service of the Church or the State
demands, the one vital and supreme requisite is a de-
sire to find the truth and a resolve to follow it when

THOMAS JEFFERSON 123

found. The temptation that most easily besets us
all is to let personal interest, or vanity, or party spirit,
or friendship, or even the sense of beauty, distract us
from the pursuit of truth. Now the habit of seeking
truth, though it is rightly counted among the moral
virtues, is a habit which University training can help
us to acquire through the examples set by great scholars
and historians and investigators of nature, and by the
practice of critical methods applied with scrupulous
accuracy. It is the ever-present note of the real scholar,
the real philosopher, the real historian.

The bitterest critics of Thomas Jefferson have never
denied his patriotic devotion to the interests of Virginia
nor ever disparaged his zeal for the spread of knowl-
edge. It was the union in him of these two passions
that prompted his life-long labors for the establishment
of your University. There are no excellences which
he would have more desired that it should implant in
its students. Nor has its career belied his hopes.
The University of Virginia has always sent forth men
eminent both in learning and in the field of public life.
She has never condescended to the superficial or the
meretricious. Her standards of attainment have been
high and her scholars have maintained them. She
has been also a home of patriotism and civic virtue.
Many of her sons have done splendid service for the
nation, and have reflected glory upon this seat of learn-
ing and on the Commonwealth of Virginia. May this
oldest of aU your States, the mother of Washington

124 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

and of so many other illustrious figures in American
history, ever hold high that banner of freedom and
enlightenment which her founders planted on the
shores of the New World three hundred and one
years ago.

MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT

Address Delivered at the Laymen's Missionary Convention
AT Chattanooga, May 21, 1907.

J

MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT

Address Delivered at the Laymen's Missionary Convention
AT Chattanooga, May 21, 1907.

The history of Christian Missions combines the
interest which attaches to striking characters and
strange adventures with that of tracing a long world
movement which has passed through various phases,
and has in each of them affected, and been affected by,
events of the first moment. A comprehensive view of
that history, connecting it with the general progress
on the one hand of geographical discovery and on the
other of religious thought and practice, would be a
theme worthy of a philosophic historian. It is, how-
ever, only with the most recent phases of missionary
work that I can attempt to deal in this address.

In the ancient world there was, before Christianity
appeared, neither religious propaganda nor religious
persecution. Each tribe, each region, had its own
special or local gods, and each respected the local
gods of the others. If now and then some invad-
ing general pillaged a sanctuary of the deities of
another country, it was avarice alone that prompted
him. Opinion condemned him, and he was likely —
so men believed — to receive speedy punishment at the

127

128 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

hands of the offended powers. Thus the worship of one
set of gods did not exclude the worship of another set,
for all deities were deemed entitled to respect, each in
his own jurisdiction. Similarly, since no faith claimed
to be exclusively true or of universal authority, its
votaries had no reason for trying to convert others to
it by persuasion, nor for persecuting those who adhered
to their local worships. Even when the people of Israel
denied the existence of any God but their own, they
did not seek to proselytize, because it was to Israel
alone that Jehovah had revealed himself.

With the advent of Christianity the scene changed.
It claimed to be the only true religion, and sought to
save a world lying in wickedness by denouncing and
expunging all the worships of the heathen. Devotion
to God and love for perishing men alike made the
propagation of the faith its first duty. Hence it
encountered a hostility never previously aroused by
any other religion. The first missions were immediately
followed by the first persecutions. After three cen-
turies of missionary progress, frequently interrupted
by relentless severities, Christianity triumphed. Two
centuries later, being then supported by the whole
power of the State, it began to repress first the linger-
ing devotees of paganism, then those who, differing
from the ruling orthodoxy, had been branded as here-
tics by Councils of the Church. So were ushered in
those ages of persecution which in Spain and Spanish
America lasted down to the days of our grandfathers.

MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 129

There is a striking passage in Lucretius in which
he laments the evil wrought by superstition, referring
to the instances of human sacrifice, rare as these were
in Greece or Rome, though common enough at Car-
thage, and dwelhng on the gloom cast upon life by
the fear of suffering after death. He wrote before
rehgious persecution had been dreamt of. How
much darker would have been the picture a poet
might have drawn in those later centuries when it
was deemed a duty to extirpate heresy by the sword
and the faggot !

One may distinguish three chief phases among those
through which missions have passed. In the first,
which began with the Apostles, and was continued
through a long line of glorious saints, Christianity
went forth, trusting entirely to the power and the pur-
ity of its own teachings. It promised salvation through
Christ and through a life led in obedience to his pre-
cepts. St. Patrick preached to the Gael of Ireland,
St. Columba to the Picts of North Britain, St. Augus-
tine to the heathen of Kent, St. Boniface, St. Columban,
St. Gall, and many another missionary from the British
Isles to the heathen of Germany. Some of them died
a martyr's death. All of them went out like sheep
among wolves, trusting only to the help and blessing
of God.

In the eighth century a change came. The Frankish
Charles the Great carried his arms against the pagan
Saxons, and made conversion a part of conquest and

I30 UNIVERSITY AND mSTORICAL ADDRESSES

a pledge of submission. From his time on other
Christian warriors, some of them from ambition, some
from what they beHeved to be piety, spread the king-
dom of the Cross by arms. Olaf Tryggyvason in Nor-
way and the Crusaders in Palestine, and after them the
Teutonic knights on the shores of the Baltic, gave the
choice between baptism and death. So did the Span-
iards when they burst into the New World. Wherever
these terrible conquerors went, the native worships were
blotted out and Christianity enforced at the sword's
point. They were continuing beyond the ocean the
crusade on behalf of the Faith which they had only
just completed in Spain against the Moors.

With them, however, the forcible propagation of Chris-
tianity practically ended. Neither the French mis-
sionaries on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes,
nor the English missionaries Hke John Eliot in Massa-
chusetts sought the aid of carnal weapons. The earher
and better stage in which the Gospel relied on its owti
intrinsic virtue was now returning. In this third stage
missions have, with few exceptions, remained ever since ;
but it is still worth while to remember into what un-
christian conduct misguided zeal drove men who
thought they were helping Christianity.

In our own time missions entered on what may be
called a fourth stage, in which their aim and purpose is
differently conceived. We have learnt to distinguish
more carefuUy between different kinds of non-Christian
religions and to recognize the good features that belong

I

i

MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 131

to some of them, especially to Buddhism and to
Islam. Time was when the success of a mission was
measured by the number of congregations it was able
to form in a heathen country, and the number of con-
verts annually added to the fold. But this is now no
longer deemed the chief object of its work, and the
mere public profession of adherence to Christianity
is valued only when it is believed to indicate a real
and permanent change of life and mind.

The views now entertained as to the future in another
world of those who pass into it without ever having
heard the Gospel message, are less despondent than
those that prevailed among Christians eighty years
ago. There is an enlarged conception of what
is meant by bringing truth and light to the peo-
ple that sat in darkness, and it begins to be felt
that what is needed is to raise the whole conception
of life and transform the character by implanting
higher ideals which will cut off at the root the degrad-
ing customs of pagan life. When the missionary has
to deal with the religions of the more civilized non-
Christian peoples, he treats with respect whatever is
best in the moral teachings of Buddha or of Mohammed
and tries to meet the followers of Confucius on the
ethical ground he and they have in common, feeling
that even when few converts are made much good
may be done by the diffusion of elevating ideas and of
Christian morality. Even such usages and supersti-
tions as it may be desired to extirpate are treated more

132 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

gently, not only because we have begun to feel a sort
of scientific interest in these survivals of primaeval
custom, but because it is seen that improvements
come best when they come from within, from a mind and
heart that has been awakened to a higher view of a
Divine Power, and of man's relation to it.

These changes in our views of what missions may
accomplish and what methods they may follow are
not the index of any lessened faith or slackening
earnestness. Preaching is not the only, nor always
the shortest, way to the end desired. I remember that
when Dr. Livingstone, after several short journeys,
finally quitted his mission station to enter upon that
great exploration of Africa and crusade against the
slave trade which have given him a place among the
benefactors of mankind, there were some well-mean-
ing but small-minded persons who censured him for
deserting his proper missionary work. But in a few
years no one doubted that he had rendered infinitely
greater services to the world and to Christianity by his
journeys and the Hght he threw on African problems
than he could have done by remaining with the little
Kaffir congregation to which he ministered.

Such gatherings as the Laymen's Missionary Move-
ment has been holding all over this country are an evi-
dence that there is no decline of zeal among American
Christians. So also the approaching International Con-
gress in Edinburgh shows that the denominational nar-
rowness and rivalry which used to distract the efforts

i

MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 133

of missionary organizations has given place to a frater-
nal spirit which seeks to make all the religious bodies
work together, aiming not at uniformity in organi-
zation, but at friendly cooperation in a common
cause. It is well this should be so, for the cir-
cumstances of the time we live in make the claim of
missions an urgent and insistent call upon all these
bodies. It is of that urgency, of the movements
of change now passing on the world, and of the
need there is for prompt and united action before
change goes further that I desire to speak. I speak
as a traveller who has seen missions in many a
foreign country, and I am emboldened to speak to
you by remembering that nothing has done more to
keep the hearts of Americans and Englishmen close
together than the work they have sought to do in the
same spirit for the kingdom of God. In these latest
centuries we have been the two great missionary nations.
Spanish and Portuguese missionaries did an immense
work, especially in the sixteenth century : French mis-
sionaries an immense work, especially in the seven-
teenth. Germans and Swiss have labored effectually in
the nineteenth, but your and our peoples have perhaps
done the most, and have done it on the same lines, in
the same faith, following the same principles, always
trusting to the power of truth and not to force. So
the traveller, wherever he goes, finds American and
British missionaries always working side by side,
always ready to help one another.

134 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

Missions must now be regarded as parts of a great
world movement, one out of the many influences which
are now exercised, more powerfully than ever before,
by the civilized upon the uncivilized or savage peoples.

The world has grown smaller ; steam and electric-
ity have brought its parts together ; and as the
civilized races have spread out over its surface, there
is no place where their influence is not felt, so that,
with the exception of two ancient empires in the East,
nearly every part of the world has been brought under
the control of some of the civilized white races, and
even those empires are now in close relations with
white races. Now, that is a new phenomenon. In
the midst of these new phenomena missions to the un-
civilized races, are indispensable, for if Christianity is
not brought to bear upon them, the contact may make
their last state worse than their first. To that point I
shall presently return and shall try to convey to you
two features in the more recent history of missions on
which it seems proper to dwell, viz., the causes which
retard the progress of Christianity in unciviHzed coun-
tries, and the special need which exists at this mo-
ment for diffusing it there.

Meantime, let me, as one who has seen many
missions in many parts of the world, bear testi-
mony to the splendid work which is being done in
our own time by Christian missionaries. There
have not been any nobler examples of devotion to
duty, of self-sacrifice, of the renunciation of the

MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 135

ordinary pleasures and joys of the world for the
sake of a higher calling, than those which our mission-
aries have given during the last eighty years. Let me
pay especial tribute to the work which is being done
by the many missions of this country. I have seen
them in India, where their work is admirable, and
where some of your missionaries are men as wise as
can be found in that vast country, men who know as
much about India and are as much worthy to be lis-
tened to on that subject as any men to be met there.
No better evidence than theirs can be desired as to
the working of British rule there, for they can regard
its action impartially, yet with perfect comprehension;
I have seen them also in various parts of the Turkish
East, where they are placed among Mohammedans
and certain ancient non-Protestant churches. The
Christian peoples of the East have suffered terribly
in recent years, and they may have yet a great deal
to suffer. In 1895 ^^^ 1896 more than one hundred
thousand Armenian Christians were massacred by the
orders of Sultan Abdul Hamid. Many of them were
women, many might have saved their lives if they
had spoken three words to renounce Christianity;
yet, like the martyrs of the apostolic age, they refused
to sacrifice their Christian faith, and went willingly to
death for the sake of their Lord and Master. Among
these peoples it has been the duty of your American
missionaries to labor, not proselytizing but befriending
them educationally and otherwise. And the best work

136 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

that has ever been done among them has been done
by those missionaries. Whenever the EngHsh friends
of the Armenian Christians desired to know what was
happening in Asiatic Turkey, whenever we desired
to find some means of relieving the famine-stricken
and down-trodden people, whenever it became neces-
sary to ascertain what, if anything, could be done
by political action to alleviate the sufferings of these
oppressed and martyred races, I have always found
that the best thing to do was to turn to the American
missionaries. And I have often heard from members
of the ancient Armenian church the warmest acknowl-
edgment of the great services which your missionaries
have rendered to them.

Now, when you recall the splendid work which
missions have done, when we think also of how long
they have been at work, and of the advantages which
those who come forth from civilized nations ought to
possess, are you not sometimes surprised that Christian-
ity has not long ago overspread the whole world ? Why
is it that more progress has not been made ? Think
of the beginnings of Christianity, when St. Paul and
the other apostles went out to make those first mis-
sionary tours, recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.
They went out few in number, through a pagan world,
a world which was dominated by ancient and powerful
religions, where all authority and all secular powers
were on the side of the old religions, and where before
long those powers, the emperors and their governors

4

MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 137

and other officers, put forth their whole strength to
resist and extinguish Christianity ; and a series of cruel
persecutions took place, extending over nearly three
centuries, by which it was attempted to root out the
new religion from the earth. Those persecutions failed.
Christianity spread itself over the empire against all
the power the empire could put forth, and made its
way in the teeth of persecutions until at last it grew
so strong that the emperors were obliged to recognize
it; and from that time forth it became the dominant
religion over all the world, except fire- worshipping
Persia, that the Romans knew. It did that work in
three centuries.

Since that time sixteen hundred years have passed,
and Christianity has had most of the material forces
of the world on its side, nearly all the military power,
as well as nearly all the learning and civilization, ex-
cept during a comparatively short period when there
was more literature and science in Musulman than in
European countries. Why, then, has not Christianity
succeeded in converting the whole earth ?

That is, indeed, a question worth asking. It is a
question you have doubtless often asked yourselves.
We shall do better to reflect on what we have not ac-
complished, and try to discover why it is that we have
failed, than to exult in what we have accomplished. It
may be that we shall discover some of the causes which
have weakened us and prevented us from obtaining,
with material advantages on our side, what the apostles

138 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

and their successors obtained with all the material
forces and civil powers against them. I am going to
give one reason ; it is only one of several reasons, but
it is a reason which is brought forcibly home to who-
ever travels in uncivilized countries and notes the
limited success attained by missions in places where
the zeal and devotion of the missionaries are evident.

The preaching of the gospel is but one among many
forces and influences which have been brought to bear
on the uncivilized races during the last four centuries,
and some of those other influences have largely neu-
tralized the effect of the gospel. What was the first
thing that happened when the Spaniards and the Por-
tuguese began to settle in the American islands and
continents ? One of their main objects was to convert
the heathen. They were pious, according to their
lights, and quite sincere in their eagerness to spread the
faith. They took out a great many friars with them,
and set them to preaching. The cross was carried up
and down the islands, and the friars preached ; and the
natives, whether or not they understood and believed,
were at any rate baptized and compelled to attend
mass and say that they were Christians. The native
religions or superstitions had little hold on these poor,
simple savages of the Antilles, and of many parts of the
American continents also, so they yielded easity.
The Conquerors thought they were saving souls,
whether by persuasion or force ; and they would have
thought it absurd not to use force in that holy war-

J

MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 139

fare. But the Conquerors did something more than
this. Though the friars came to preach, the adven-
turers who swarmed into tropical America came with
a fierce greed for gold. That was what they chiefly
sought in the New World. Finding gold ornaments
among the people, they asked where they came from ;
they searched for the gold mines, and put the natives
to work in them. They set them also to till the soil,
and those weak, simple-minded aborigines, accus-
tomed to raising just enough food to support them-
selves, were driven to work under the stern eye
and cruel scourge of a Spanish taskmaster, until in
the island of Hispaniola (now Hayti )and in the Ba-
hamas, the whole population died out under the severi-
ties of the Spanish rule within thirty or forty years
after the discovery of the islands. The same thing
happened in the other conquered territories. Wherever
the Spaniard went he seized the land of the people,
reduced them to what was virtually slavery, and
forced them to work in the mines or till the soil for
him.

That was probably the most harsh and terrible form
which the contact of a civilized race with an uncivilized
ever took. It ended with the extermination of many
a native tribe. And yet something of that kind,
though not so bad, has been going on ever since.
Something of the kind is going on in the South Ameri-
can forests now. Wherever the strong races who, like the
Spaniards, possessed horses and firearms, races with the

1

I40 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

appliances of civilization at their command, have come
into contact with weaker races, that sort of thing has
happened. Everywhere the native has gone to the
wall. Sometimes, where the native race was weak, it
has been extinguished ; it dies out either under harsh
treatment or under the diseases which the white
man brings with him, or through use of the Hquor
which he has supplied to them. In one way or an-
other the native races, if not extinguished, have at
any rate become demoralized. They lose those native
customs which governed their life, and experience
shews that it is easier to acquire the vices of the white
man than to imitate his virtues.

I do not wish to overstate the case. I do not deny
that some of these evils were inevitable. The contact
of a superior civilized race with a barbarous race must
always bring some harm to the weaker. But the evils
need not have been so great if the civilized men who
went among the natives had behaved like Christians.
Unfortunately, that was just what few of them did.
There were always some good men among them who
tried to protect the natives, even some laymen among
the first Spanish conquerors and many among the
clergy. The noble Las Casas who spent his life in
trying to protect the American aborigines was only
one of many excellent Spanish churchmen. But the
forces of rapine and avarice and that sort of arrogant
contempt which the strong man feels for the weak
were more potent forces. Down to our own times

i

MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 141

you will find that the natives suffered far more than
they gained. Their land was taken without giving
them anything for it, and they were driven away
or shot down. The trader who went among them
cheated them, and did what was even worse : he
sold them vile liquor that ruined them body and
soul. Despite all the efforts made in recent years,
those practices go on in some places still. It would
have been a good thing for the natives if the art of
distillation had never been discovered. It was only
the other day, after whole tribes had perished, that
we awakened to a sense of the tremendous evils
wrought among native peoples by the sale of drink.
It does harm enough among white people, but far
more among a savage or semi-civilized race, for they
are not seasoned to it, as in a certain way a number of
our own populations have become, and they have less
self-control than civilized men. It works like poison
upon them and destroys them.

These things could not but injure and retard the
work of Christianity. How was it possible for the
natives not to look at the practice of the white man as
well as at his preaching ? The missionary represented
a religion of justice, of peace, and of love. But with
the missionary came the man who tried to take away
the land of the native or sold him worthless goods or
intoxicated him with his liquor. How was it possible
for the natives, when they saw these men who called
themselves "Christians" just as did the missionaries.

142 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

not to be struck by the divergence between the practice
and the doctrines of this new religion ? The saying is
attributed to some African prince that the process going
on in his country was : "First missionary, then trader,
then army." The missionary came first, and well it
would have been if he had been left to do his work
alone. But before the missionary had succeeded in
Christianizing the people, the trader came to undo the
missionary's work.

Even where the white man does not rob or injure the
natives there is something in his attitude when he finds
himself among an uncivilized people that is harsh
and unchristian. He acts toward them as if they
were persons to whom he can do whatever he likes.
Those who have travelled among savages or semi-
savages will know what I mean when I say that it
takes almost the temper of a saint to keep the white
man from treating with arrogance or scorn a people
who are very much weaker than himself and who fre-
quently provoke him by an astonishing slackness or
thoughtlessness or inconstancy of purpose. Nothing
but a sense of human duty and Christian duty can
prevent a man from acting harshly or unfairly when
he is placed in such conditions. No doubt the natives
often give provocation. In parts of Australia and in
Tierra del Fuego they stole the sheep that had been
placed upon the lands that once were theirs. But this
does not excuse the settlers who went out in parties
to shoot them down.

i

MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 143

This behaviour and this attitude of the stronger
white race have been among the chief obstacles to
the advance of Christianity.

There were times when the governments of so-
called Christian states themselves were little better
than the adventurers who disgraced the Christian
name. The long perpetuation, by the favour of
such governments, of the African slave trade, the
most hideous piece of cruelty and wrong ever per-
petrated by civilized upon uncivilized men, is a terri-
ble instance. It has been only in the last sixty or
seventy years that these governments have awakened
to a proper sense of their duties. Most of them have
latterly tried, and are now honestly trying, to protect
the natives. This is not yet the case in all parts of the
world. There are one or two lamentable exceptions.
But it is the case wherever either the United States or
Great Britain holds sway. Your government and the
British government are doing their best wherever their
flags fly to protect the native in every way they can.
In India it has been for a century past the sole and
whole-hearted object of the English government to
administer absolutely equal justice in India between
the European and the native and to give the native as
complete a protection and as good a government as
the circumstances of the country will permit.

But even where the government performs its duty
it is possible for the private adventurer, or the trading
corporation behind the private adventurer that sup-

144 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

plies the funds and does not watch how the adventurer
behaves, to do a great deal of harm. They it is who
discredit Christianity. While the missionary is preach-
ing, the adventurer goes on cheating the native or oust-
ing him from his land, sometimes even forcing him into
a sort of slavery, and punishing him if he fails to
fulfil the allotted task, and the trading company at
home draws the profits. The temptations to abuse
strength have been great and have been yielded to.
No wonder that these things checked the advance
of Christianity. No wonder that it spread more
rapidly while adversity and persecution gave it
the opportunity to show the distinctively Christian
virtues of faith, constancy, humility, and love than it
did when all the powers of this earth were on its side,
that it advanced faster against the hostility of Roman
emperors like Nero, Decius, and Diocletian than it
has advanced with all the strength of civilization behind
it. It is not that any power has gone out of the gospel ;
it is not that the best men in Christian nations were
any less zealous ; but other men went on undoing the
missionary's work all the time he was preaching.

If this be true, what is the duty of Christian men
to-day ? That duty certainly is not to ask govern-
ments to spread the gospel by force. No more action
like that of the Spaniards who carried the scourge and
the sword while the friars carried the crucifix. You
do not believe that the blessing of God will rest upon
such methods.

MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 145

Neither do you desire that governments should
give any poHtical support to missionaries. The more
that missions are kept apart from poHtical authori-
ties and left to rely on themselves, the better. What
you do desire is to strengthen the hands of the civ-
ilized governments when they try to secure for the
native justice, considerate treatment, full protection
against the craft or violence of the adventurer.

It is in your power to do that. Public opinion can
strengthen the hands of the governments ; it can
encourage each government to lay down and carry out
rules for the due protection of the native. We all know
that the United States government desired to carry
out honestly and in the right spirit such a policy
even when the Red Indians were being defrauded of
their lands or of the supplies given them. Your
national government always meant to do right, though
it was not always able to supervise its agents.

We in Britain wish to do the same ; and we are
always appealing to our government and assuring them
that they will have and do now have the spirit of the
British public behind them in endeavouring to protect
the native. And if there are still parts of the world
in which the natives are to-day ill treated, let us
trust that the public opinion of America and of Eng-
land will speak out and will demand that the native
races everywhere be duly cared for and delivered from
oppression.

Your duty does not end with subscribing to the mis-

146 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

sionary societies. It requires you to watch wherever
over the world the advance of Christianity is being
hindered by the wicked practices of white men to see
that the adventurer and the trader are restrained if they
wrong the natives by force or fraud, and absolutely to
prohibit the sale of liquor to the natives. The natives
ought to be regarded as children, and have the measure
both of care and of tenderness which is given to chil-
dren, for under the conditions in which their life has
been passed, they cannot be expected to rise quickly
to the level of civilized man.

This brings me to the other point which I desire.

The position is now becoming critical. You are
often told — and you are told with truth — that this
is a critical time for civilized countries. It is a time
when there are all sorts of new ideas in the air, a time
when many ancient landmarks have been removed, and
when efforts are being made to remove even those that
remain. In this country you are receiving vast new
masses of population. In the Old World new social
and political movements have begun to stir up even
the hitherto most stagnant countries. But if you
look beyond Europe and America, at what is pass-
ing among the savage or semi-civilized races of man-
kind, and note the changes which have come upon
them within the last fifty years and which are tell-
ing upon them now, you will perceive that this is
perhaps the most critical moment ever seen in the
history of the non-Christian nations and races, a mo-

MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 147

ment most significant in its bearing on their future.
The races of European origin have now obtained con-
trol of the whole world (except two or three ancient
Asiatic states, and their influence, political and financial
is felt far more deeply than ever before even in those
parts of the world over which they do not exercise direct
political sway.

While our material civilization is permeating every
people, our ideas and the example of our institutions
are also telling as never before upon these more back-
ward races. In half a century or less that which we call
European civilization will have overspread the earth and
extinguished the organizations and customs of the
savage and semi- civilized tribes or nations. The native
tribes will have been broken up, native kingdoms will
have vanished, native customs will have gone ; every-
where the white man will have established his influence
and destroyed the old native ways of life. All is
trembling and crumbling away under the shock and
impact of the stronger, harder civilization which the
white foreigners, penetrating everywhere by our easier
methods of transportation by land and sea, have brought
with them. Things which have endured from the Stone
Age until now are at last coming to a perpetual end,
and will be no more. They will vanish from the face
of the earth. This is something that has never hap-
pened before and can never happen again.

When all these savage and semi-civilized peoples
have lost their ancient organizations, their ancient

148 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

customs and their ancient beliefs, they will, along with
these things, lose also their ancient morality, such
as it was, which had its sanctions in those customs
and beliefs. If you destroy these, their morality falls
to the ground and is gone, and they are left with noth-
ing, adrift upon a wide and shoreless sea. You may
say that their customs were often bad, their morality
often immorality. That is true. Much of it ought
to disappear. Yet with all its tolerance of vice and
all its degrading practices, it had in some ways a
certain beneficial action upon their conduct. Its
sanctions exercised some control for good. It fur-
nished a basis for the conduct of life better than the
mere unrestrained impulse to the gratification of every
passion and desire. It prescribed some kinds of virtu-
ous actions, such as good faith (at least with one an-
other), mutual help in times of want, hospitality, and
compassion for the helpless. There are savage peo-
ples who have these virtues, and they were inter-
twined with supernatural sanctions which are now
perishing.

The process of destruction and disintegration which
I have described is inevitable, and it is advancing
swiftly. If we measure time by the lifetime of a man,
the end may seem still distant, but we can begin to
conjecture the date of its arrival. Already there are
hardly any heathen left in the two American con-
tinents (though there are millions of aborigines who
are not Christians in any effective sense), and hardly

MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 149

any in the isles of the Pacific. Only in India and the
East Indian archipelago, and in South Central Africa
and parts of West Africa do there remain any large
masses of idolatrous or spirit- worshipping men. Within
less than two centuries the whole non- Christian
world may be practically divided between Buddhism
and Islam, and although the latter of those two
great faiths is still spreading in parts of Africa and
Asia, the hold of both upon their votaries may by
that time have been sensibly weakened.

That is why the present moment is so critical and
so precious. If these peoples are losing the old cus-
toms and beliefs which have ruled them thus far, the
time has come to give them something new and bet-
ter. Unless they receive some new moral basis of
life, some beliefs and motives and precepts which
can appeal to their hearts and rule their conduct, can
restrain bad impulses, and instil worthy conceptions
of life and duty and worship, their last state may
be worse than the first. Having overspread the world,
and taken these weaker races under our control, we
cannot evade the responsibility that lies upon us to
think and to care for them. It was at the prompt-
ing of our own interests that we of the white races
disturbed their ancient ways of life, for we went
among them, some few doubtless with a desire to do
good, but the great majority from a desire to make
money and to exploit the world's .resources for profit
of the white man. Under the aegis of his govern-

I50 UNIVERSITY AND mSTORICAL ADDRESSES

ment, he is taking the agricultural wealth from the soil,
the forests from the hills, and the minerals out of the
rocks, all for his own benefit. Of all this wealth noth-
ing, except perhaps a meagre W9,ge for manual labour,
goes to the native.

The power of civilized man has too often come as
a crushing force in a destroying hand. Let the gospel
of Christ come to these races, the old foundations
of whose life are crumbHng away beneath them,
not as the mere nominal profession of those who
are grasping their land and trying to profit by
their toil, but accompanied by justice and tender-
ness in action, and recommended by example as well
as by precept. Let it come as a beneficent power
which can fill their hearts with new thoughts and new
hopes, which may become a link between them and
ourselves, averting that strife and suffering which will
otherwise follow, and leading them gently forward into
the light. Let it be a bond between all races of man-
kind of whatever blood, or speech, or colour, a sacred
bond to make them feel and believe that they and we
are all the children of one Father in heaven.

i

THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES

Commencement Address to the University or Wisconsin at
Madison, June, 1908.

THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES

Commencement Address to the University of Wisconsin at
Madison, June, 1908.

This University of Wisconsin in which we are met
stands by common consent in the front rank among the
State Universities of the United States. It is younger
than some of them, but inferior to none in the width
of its curriculum and the ability of its staff, and it is
perhaps more conspicuously identified then any other
with the political life of the State. This is therefore
a fitting place in which one who delivers a Commence-
ment Address may choose for his theme the various
origins from which universities have sprung, the
various forms in which they have organized themselves,
and the peculiar features and functions which belong
to the American State Universities, that "latest birth
of time."

A university is, in its simplest form, nothing more
than an aggregation of teachers and learners. It
was in that way that the earliest universities of modern
Europe began. Salerno, Bologna, Paris, were the
first cities in which crowds of learners gathered round
a few eminent teachers of medicine (in the first), of law
(in the second), of theology and dialectics (in the third).
Such too were the beginnings of Oxford and Cambridge.

153

154 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

In each of those trading towns situated upon rivers,
then the chief avenues of commerce, a concourse of
students formed itself round a few learned men, and
presently grew to vast dimensions. These universities
were not founded by any public authority, but founded
themselves, springing up naturally out of the desire
for knowledge ; and hence we in England describe our
two Universities of Oxford and Cambridge as being
''corporations at common law," i.e. deriving their
legal quality as corporate bodies from ancient custom
which antedates the time of legal memory. The same
thing had happened in the Eastern World. Where Is-
lam reigned, schools sprang up in the great mosques like
that famous one of El Azhar in Cairo which still draws
thousands of students of all ages from aU parts of the
Musulman world. Later on in the Middle Ages
sovereigns began to establish such places of learning.
The Emperor Frederick II set up one at Naples in
A.D. 1225, Pope Gregory IX another at Toulouse in
1233. The first in the Germanic Empire was that of
Prague, founded by Pope Clement VI and Emperor
Charles the Fourth in 1347-1348 ; and others followed,
such as that famous school at Heidelberg which the
Elector Palatine Rupert, and Pope Urban VI at his
request, set up in 1386.

Popes had also assumed the right of founding uni-
versities, and with good right, because their ecclesias-
tical jurisdiction embraced all Europe, and they were
called upon to see that a due supply both of tramed

THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 155

theologians and trained lawyers was always forth-
coming. In Scotland the Universities of Glasgow and
Aberdeen, for instance, were founded by papal bulls,
but when after the breach between England and
Rome Queen Elizabeth desired to create a university
in Ireland she did it herself by a royal charter. In
modern Europe, since the conception has grown up
that a university is an institution entitled to grant
degrees, and since degrees themselves have obtained
more or less legal recognition, it is now understood
that nothing less than some public authority, such as
either a royal grant or a statute, can create a univer-
sity. It is thus that the eight new universities re-
cently established, and the most recent of them per-
haps too hastily established, in England, viz., London,
Durham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham^
Sheffield, and Bristol, have been constituted.

Here in the United States you have allowed the
widest freedom, so colleges and universities, great and
smaU, have sprung up all over the country in a crop
almost too abundant. Harvard and Yale were the
foundations of private benefactors, though their States
subsequently aided them. Many other colleges owe
their origin to religious denominations. But the most
interesting, and certainly the most peculiar and char-
acteristically American, type has been that of the uni-
versity founded and supported and governed by the
State.

Before proceeding to consider how this scheme of

156 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

State support and control has worked, let me try to
give you a brief view of the universities of the three
countries whose conditions and ideas most resemble
yours in America. I mean Germany, England, and
Scotland, — countries in each of which the university
has played a great part and has not only illustrated
the character of the nation but done much to form that
character.

The universities of Germany have, during the last
seventy years, led the world in the completeness of
their teaching organization, in the amphtude of the
provision of instruction in every branch of knowledge
which they make, and in the services they render to
the prosecution of research. In these respects they
have set an example to the world, an example whose
value is recognized in the United States, from which so
many students have gone to Germany. The level of
learning among the teachers, taken as a whole, is per-
haps higher than anywhere else : and it is to the en-
ergy of these teachers that we must largely ascribe that
completeness with which special training has been
brought to bear upon every department of practical
life in Germany, upon private business in production
and distribution no less than upon all kinds of admin-
istrative work. A control is exercised over the univer-
sities by the government which you here and we in
England might think excessive, but in practice it does
not seem to be harmful, for public opinion practically
secures freedom of teaching and relieves the professors

THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 157

from undue interference. The tradition of respect for
the great seats of learning, strong in the minds of the
German bureaucracy, who have all been educated there,
is found to act as an efficient protection. Indeed, the
whole nation cares for the universities, is proud of the
universities, recognizes, as perhaps no other nation has
ever done, the value for practical life of full knowledge
and exact training, so that everything is done which
money and organizing skill can do to maintain the in-
stitutions of learning and teaching at the highest level
of efficiency. Nor must I forget to add that the uni-
versities have another claim on the affection of the
German people in the fact that when, after the battle
of Jena in 1806, North Germany lay for a time pros-
trate at the feet of a foreign conqueror, it was in the
universities that the patriotic national spirit found its
surest home, and it was among their professors and
students that the movement began which culminated
in the liberation of the German fatherland.

The universities of England — and here I speak
chiefly of Oxford and Cambridge, as the oldest and by
far the most characteristic educational product of
English soil — belong to a different t5^e. Although
the great scientific discoveries of the last centuries are
due to British more than to any other discoverers,
these universities have not in recent years contributed
so largely to original research either in natural science
or in the human subjects as have their sisters in Ger-
many. They are far less completely organized for the

158 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

purposes of instruction. They do not educate so large
a proportion of the people. They have been, since the
Reformation, for the most part places of resort for the
upper and middle classes, and it is only within the last
thirty years that they began to be rendered easily ac-
cessible to the promising and diligent youth of the
poorer sections of society. But they have had several
conspicuous merits which are specially their own.
Their ideal has been to give not so much an education
qualifying a man to succeed in any particular walk of
life as that general education which will fit him to be a
worthy member of church and commonwealth. They
have sought to develop men as men, to shape and
polish a completely harmonious and well-rounded in-
tellect and character, a personality in w^hom all facul-
ties have been cultivated and brought as nearly as may
be to a symmetrical completeness. And in aiming at
this, they have thought not only of learning or of the
powers of the speculative intellect, but also of the apti-
tudes which find their scope in practical life, and which
enable a man to work usefully with other men and to
exercise a wholesome influence in his community. Ox-
ford and Cambridge have long been closely associated
with the public life of the nation. In the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries nearly all of those who
reached high eminence as statesmen were their
alumni, and gratefully acknowledged how much they
owed to the Alma Mater. That which they did owe
was not always learning nor even the power of ready

THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 159

and finished speech, a power which must always count
for much in the poHtical hfe of a free country. It was
perhaps rather the knowledge of human nature, the tact
and judgment, the sense of honour and comradeship
which daily social intercourse in the colleges of these
universities tended to form. In these colleges — there
are twenty-two in Oxford and nineteen in Cambridge
— there is a sort of domestic life which brings the
students into close touch with one another. The
undergraduates dine together in the same college hall
along with the graduate members of the college who
are the teachers. They worship in the same college
chapel. They have their sports together, each col-
lege with its cricket team and its racing boats on the
river. The opportunities for forming friendships are
unrivalled, and thus it comes to pass that those who
remember Oxford and Cambridge say that they learnt
as much from one another as they did from their pro-
fessors and tutors. Moreover, the domestic arrange-
ments of our English college life create a more easy
and familiar intercourse between the teachers, espe-
cially the younger ones, and the undergraduates than
exists anywhere else. The undergraduate students
are the friends of their teachers, living with them on
an equality which is of course tempered by the respect
due to age and experience. It is a pleasant relation,
good for the older and the younger alike. Thus has
there been created in Oxford and Cambridge that
impalpable thing which we call an Atmosphere, an

l6o UNIVERSITY AND fflSTORICAL ADDRESSES

intellectual and social tone which forms manners and
refines taste, and strengthens characters by traditions
inherited from a long and splendid past.

The four universities of Scotland are very different
from the English, and rather resemble the universities
of Germany. Though far less completely equipped
than are the latter, for Scotland has been a com-
paratively poor country, they have always given a
high quality of instruction, and produced a large
number of remarkable men. There are no residential
colleges like those of England, so the undergraduates
live in lodgings, where they please, and thus there is
less of social student life. But the instruction is
stimulating; and the undergraduates, being mostly
poor men, and coming of a diligent and aspiring stock,
are more generally studious and hard-working and
self-reliant than are those of Oxford and Cambridge.
Within the last twenty years women have been ad-
mitted to the classes, and that which was deemed an
experiment is pronounced to be a success.

Last, I come to your own universities. Whereas the
universities of Germany have been popular but not
free, and those of England free but not popular, yours,
like those of Scotland, are both popular and free.
Their doors are open to every one, and every one
enters. They are untrammeled by any religious or
political prejudices, even when they are associated vnth.
a particular denomination, and they have been, mth
comparatively few exceptions, managed without any

THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES i6i

intrusion of political influences. Many of them
allow the student a wider choice among subjects of
study and leave him in other ways more free to do as
he pleases than is the case in any other institutions in
the English-speaking world.

Nor is it only that your universities are accessible
to all classes. They have achieved what has never
been achieved before, — they have led all classes of the
people to believe in the value of university education
and wish to attain it. They have made it seem a
necessary part of the equipment of every one who
can afford the time to take it. In England, and indeed
in Europe generally, such an education has been a
luxury for the ordinary man, though it may have been
reckoned almost a necessity for those who are entering
on one of the distinctively "learned professions." But
here it is deemed a natural preparation for a business
life also ; and the proportion of business men who have
studied at some university is far larger in the United
States than in any other country.

However, it was of your State universities only that
I meant to speak, because they are the newest, the most
peculiar, and the most interesting product of American
educational zeal. They are a remarkable expression
of the spirit which has latterly come to p'ervade this
country, that the functions of government may be
usefully extended to all sorts of undertakings for the
public benefit which it was formerly thought better
to leave to private enterprise. The provision of ele-

l62 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

mentaiy education was indeed long ago assumed by
the State, because it was deemed necessary that those
who vote as citizens should possess the rudiments of
knowledge. But in going on to found and support
and manage institutions supplying the higher forms of
education at a low or merely nominal charge, you of
the American West went further than any other com-
munities in the English-speaking world. The same
principle has guided several of your States, and this
State in particular, in so enlarging the range of uni-
versity action as to bring it into direct contact wdth
the schools and the people through systems of lectures
and correspondence and through the multiform activ-
ities of the agricultural department. The greatest asset
of a community is the energy and intelligence of its
members. Your citizens have the energy and you feel
it to be '' good business " to develop their native intel-
ligence by the completest education they can desire.

In committing yourselves to this principle you here
in the West seem to have returned to that conception
of the functions of the State which prevailed in the
Greek republics of antiquity, where it was defined as
"a partnership of men in the highest social life," and
you have abandoned that laissez-faire doctrine gen-
erally held seventy years ago which regarded the gov-
erning power in a community as established mainly
for the purpose of maintaining civil order within and
providing for defence against external foes, and held
that to go further than this was to weaken or to tram-

THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 163

mel individual initiative and to interfere with the
generally beneficent working of the natural forces
that guide social progress. Whether this reversal of
policy was needed in order to give energy and inde-
pendence their fair chance, for, as J. S. MUl observed,
it is even more fatal to exertion to have no hope of
succeeding by it than to be assured of succeeding
without it, and whether the doctrine of Greece and
Wisconsin or the doctrine of the physiocrats and
Benthamites will prove in the long run to be the best
for the stimulation of inventive thought and enterprise
and for the general advance of the community, is a
question I will not stop to discuss. This at least may
be said, that this particular form of State intervention
which the new principle has taken in the West has the
merit of associating all the citizens in a direct and
personal way with the university, making them feel it
to be their creation, arousing the liberality of the leg-
islature to it, and giving the whole State an interest in
its prosperity and efficiency.

There are, however, two risks incident to popularly
managed governmental control of all institutions of
teaching and learning, against which it is well to be
forewarned. Although neither you nor your sister
State universities may have yet encountered them,
they may some day threaten you, for popular manage-
ment is no guarantee against their appearance.

One of these is the possibility that a legislature, or a
governing authority appointed by a legislature, may

i64 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

carry politics into academical affairs, as politics have
been sometimes carried into those affairs in parts of the
European Continent where the university is an organ
of the State. Freedom is the life-blood of university
teaching. Neither the political opinions of a professor,
nor the character of the economic doctrines which he
holds and propagates, ought to be a ground for appoint-
ing or dismissing him, nor ought he to be any less free
to speak and vote as he pleases than any other citizen.
And though it is right and fitting that the State
should be represented in the governing authority
of a university which it supports, experience seems to
have proved that both the educational policy and the
daily administration and discipline of a university
ought as far as possible to be either left in academic
hands or entrusted to an authority on which the
academic element predominates.

The other risk is one to which in our time most
universities are exposed, and State universities per-
haps even more than others. The progress of natural
science has been so rapid, the results obtained by the
application of science to all forms of industry and
to many forms of commercial exchange, have been
so wonderful, the eagerness of every man to amass
wealth and of every nation to outstrip its rivals in
commerce and material progress is so keen, that the
temptation to favour at the expense of other branches
of instruction those branches from which pecuniary
gain may be expected has become unusually strong.

THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 165

It is a temptation felt everywhere, in Europe hardly-
less than here. We constantly hear men who are ready
to spend money freely on the so-called practical
branches of study, such as mining, agriculture, and
electrical engineering, disparage the study of theo-
retical science as unprofitable, while they seek to
eliminate altogether the so-called "humanistic" sub-
jects, such as philology, history, and philosophy.

This is a grave error. In the physical sciences the
discoveries of most practical importance have sprung
out of investigations undertaken purely for the sake
of knowledge, without any notion of those applications
to the industries and arts which were to be their ulti-
mate results. These it would indeed have been im-
possible to foresee. All we know of electricity, of those
chemical effects of light which have led to photography,
of those properties of certain rays in the spectrum
which have proved capable of being turned to such
admirable account in surgery, was discovered in the
pursuit of abstract science by men who were not think-
ing of practice or gain and most of whom gained Httle
except fame from their discoveries. None of them
dreamed that the telegraph and the dynamo would
issue from their experiments any more than Napier
when he invented logarithms, or Newton and Leibnitz
when they gave us the differential calculus, were
thinking of how much these improved mathematical
methods would help the engineer in his calculations.
All sound practice must be rooted in sound theory, and

i66 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

the scientific thinking that leads to discovery must
begin in the theoretic field. Whatever a nation
achieves, whatever a university achieves, is the result
of patient observation, close reasoning, and, let me
add, of the love of knowledge for its own sake ; for
the man who is bent only on finding what is pecuni-
arily profitable will miss many a path at the end of
which there stands the figure of Truth, with all the
rewards she has to bestow. Just as any nation which
should force its children to narrow their energies to
purely gainful aims would soon fall behind its com-
petitors, and see its intellectual life fade and wither, so
any university which sacrificed its teaching of the the-
ory of science to the teaching of the practical applica-
tions of science would be unworthy of its high calling
and would handle even the practical part of its work
less effectively. The loss of a high ideal means the
loss of aspiration, of faith, of vital force.

In no country are these things better understood
than in Germany, to which I refer because she has
achieved so much in the extension of her commerce
and her industry. No country has been more suc-
cessful in the application of science to the arts, and in
none has the need for a wide foundation of abstract
scientific teaching been more fully recognized.

The planting and the development of these State
Universities and the hold they have acquired upon the
people of the State, are among the most cheering cA-i-
dences of the wisdom and capacity for good work of

THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 167

your new democracies. They have their defects, but
they are filled by the desire to help the common man
onward and upward, and to help him in the best way
by providing him with the amplest measure of knowl-
edge and mental training so that he may know how
to help himself. The peoples of the Western States,
most of whom have had no college teaching themselves,
show their sense of the worth of learning and culture
by the liberality with which they support these insti-
tutions and the pride they feel in their prosperity.

These States have made you, the professors and
students of their universities, their debtors. How can
you repay that debt, and what service can you, some of
you as professors remaining here, others as youthful
graduates going out into the world, render to your States
in return ? In order to answer this question, let me
first ask another. What is it that the graduate has
received ? What does he carry away with him as the
fruit of the days of study here ? What will he remem-
ber forty years hence as the best things his university
has done for him ? If I may judge of what you will
then feel from what I and my own contemporaries
feel as we look back, through a vista of more than
fifty years, to our happy Oxford days, you will then
say that your university bestowed on you two gifts of
supereminent value.

One was Friendships. The opportunities for mak-
ing congenial friendships are ampler in college life than
ever afterwards. Besides the familiar intercourse of

i68 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

the class room, and on the campus, and wherever stu-
dents meet together, the acquiring of knowledge in
company is itself a foundation for sympathy. Joint
study becomes a bond. To have the same tastes,
to enjoy the same books, to work side by side in the
laboratory, to help one another in difficulties, to argue
out one's differences of opinions, to be inspired by the
same ideals and confide them to one another, these are
the means by which young men best enter into one
another's hearts and hopes, and form ties, which, last-
ing as long as life itself, may be a source of joy until
the end.

The other gift was the delight in Kjiowledge, a
sense of how much there is to be known, of the vast
horizon that is ever widening as one goes on learning,
of how with each one of us the enlargement of per-
sonal knowledge seems only to enlarge the sense of the
regions of mystery beyond that horizon. With this
delight there goes also a perception of the invaluable
help which real knowledge, accurate, thorough, duly
arranged and systematized, can render to each man
and each community in dealing with the facts of every
situation. And with the joy in knowledge there ought
to go, and in the minds of all who really enjoy knowl-
edge there will go, the love of Truth. Devotion to
truth, loyalty to truth under all temptations, is the in-
tellectual conscience of the man of learning and the
man of science; and to create it is the chief aim for
the sake of which universities exist. If your univer-

THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 169

sity teaching and life have not taught you that, they
have left the main thing undone.

Is there then not a way in which you as university
men going out into the world can repay to your Alma
Mater and to your State the debt you owe them?
We live in an age when difficulties thicken upon us,
when, in spite of the dissatisfaction so frequently ex-
pressed with the existing methods of government, new
work is being constantly thrust upon governments,
when the strife of labor and capital and the social un-
rest that growls and mutters all around us make it at
once more necessary to determine what justice requires
and harder to persuade any section of the community
to recede from its claims. Never was there a more
urgent need either for applying every kind of knowl-
edge to the solution of these problems, or for tr3dng
to seek the solution in a spirit free from all prejudice
or bias. Your university studies have taught you
both to realize the worth of thorough and systema-
tized knowledge and to moderate the vehemence of
partisanship by a disinterested devotion to truth.
Thus you can contribute to the community of which
you are citizens three things. One is the spirit of
progress, which is hopeful because it is always seeking
to better things by knowledge and skill. Another is
the spirit of moderation, cautious because it resists
the temptations of party passion, or the impulse, often
honest enough, to grasp at the first hasty expedient for
removing admitted evils without considering whether

I70 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

that may not involve other evils just as great. And
the third is the love of truth, which, when it is strong
enough, will help a man to overcome the promptings
of personal ambition or the baser lures which the
power of selfish wealth can offer.

It has sometimes been claimed for the University
that it is the mind of the State, or at least the organ
which the State may employ to examine and think
out the problems the State has to deal with. That
may be too large a claim. But I am speaking now
not so much of the university as a body of men
organized in an institution dedicated to teaching
and research but rather of those children of the uni-
versity who go forth from it into the world, preserving
the real academic spirit through the whole of their busi-
ness or professional careers, furnishing skilled leaders
in poUtical and social movements, and forming the pub-
lic opinion of the whole community by which nation and
State, more truly here in America than anyr^^here else
in the world, are led and ruled. Upon these citizens
comes with special force the call to translate into real-
ity that noble ideal of an educated democracy, reason-
able and just because it is educated, which the people
of America have long ago set up for themselves, and
towards which, through many obstacles, they are stead-
ily and surely moving.

THE ART OF AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS

Address to the American Institute of Architects at
Washington, December 15TH, 1908.

THE ART OF AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS

Address to the American Institute of Architects at
Washington, December 15TH, 1908.

My only justification for appearing here to say a
few words in honor of the illustrious artist you are
met to commemorate is the fact that Augustus Saint-
Gaudens was born in Ireland and of an Irish mother.
I will not dispute with my friend and colleague the
Ambassador of France how much of his artistic genius
is due to Ireland, and whether it bears the stamp of the
Gallo-Roman branch or of the Gaelic branch of the
Celtic race. But all of it that can be deemed possibly
attributable to Ireland I am going to claim for Ireland,
and that for a special reason. Ireland has, as aU the
world knows, given to the British Isles, and also to
this country, a great number of men famous in litera-
ture, famous in science, famous in war, famous in gov-
ernment. What would you have done in the United
States without Irishmen to manage your affairs of
State ? But in proportion to the genius her children
have shown in other directions, Ireland has given to
the Fine Arts, as even her admirers must admit, com-
paratively few men of first-rate eminence, and this is
the more remarkable because the ancient Celtic work

173

174 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

of the churches and monumental crosses of Ireland is
full of richness and beauty. So desiring to secure for
my island all the artistic honours possible, I must claim
Saint-Gaudens for it. I had intended to have dwelt
upon the inspiration which he derived in his early
years in Dublin from the picturesque and romantic
scenery which surrounds that ancient city, but, unfor-
tunately, I committed the fault — unpardonable in a
man with some experience in these matters, and a fault
which I hereby warn you against — of trying to verify
my facts by reference to the original authorities, and I
found that Saint-Gaudens quitted Dublin at the age
of six months. So I must fall back upon that native
quality which he drew from his Irish mother.

I will not attempt, after what has been said by
previous speakers, and especially after that analysis of
his genius, at once vigorous and delicate, which was
given by the President of the United States, to fix the
place which Saint-Gaudens holds among those who
have adorned the splendid art of sculpture, an art
which has, ever since the great Italian masters died
out nearly four centuries ago, held in the field of mod-
ern achievement a place that seems small when we com-
pare it with that supremacy yielded to it in the artistic
production of the ancient world, and which it almost
regained in Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. Among those men who stand preeminent
in sculpture since the death of IMichael Angelo, the
highest renown seems to have fallen to the Italian

THE ART OF AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 175

Canova and the Icelander Thorwaldson, and it came
to these two not so much through any new creative
quaUty they revealed in plastic work or any personal
originality that shone out in their own conceptions, as
by the fact that they reproduced the kind of beauty
and the t3^e of artistic thought which inspired the
art of the Greeks. Thus admirable as is the genius of
both, they seem to us to be revivifying, so far as
moderns can, the manner of Greece rather than to
have renewed those traditions of the grand style of the
Renaissance whose latest expressions are to be found
in the marvellous figures of the Laurentian chapel at
Florence and in those which stand around the tomb
of the Emperor Maximilian at Innsbruck.

Without venturing into the dangerous field of theoriz-
ing about art or attempting to indicate the elements
that go to the making of its highest forms, I suppose
we may all agree in thinking that there are in
sculpture three more or less distinctive kinds of excel-
lence. There is the excellence which consists in the
faithful reproduction of nature; there is the excel-
lence in which we admire pure beauty of form and
line; and there is the excellence which makes its
special appeal to the imagination of the beholder be-
cause it proceeds from the imagination of the artist
himself. When he has the power of speaking to our
intellect and emotions straight out of his own mind,
he enables us to realize not only how the subject
presented itself to his thought, but what was really

176 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

the deepest and most essential thing in his subject
itself. If the subject be a person, he reveals the in-
nermost nature of the man portrayed. If it is a scene, he
brings out the true and permanent meaning it will have
for the long Hereafter. To possess any one of these ex-
cellences in high measure is to be great. To possess
all three in such measure is to attain perfection. Au-
gustus Saint-Gaudens, we may probably agree, stood
preeminent in the third. His highest gift was his power
of imaginative conception. As all the great men
that have left their mark in the world of affairs have been
great by combining the power of thinking with energy,
promptitude, and courage in action, so all the men that
have been great in the fields of literature and art have
been great by combining the power of tliinking with the
power of feeling, that is, the capacity of receiving and
giving out an emotional impression. Now what most
strikes us in Saint-Gaudens' works is that, whatever
else we find, we find an intense and profound power of
thinking combined with an equal power of feeling.
Look around upon these works in this room. Does he
not seem to you, whenever he approached a subject,
be it a man or an incident, to have sat do^vn and medi-
tated, slowly and patiently, until he had discovered for
himself exactly what lay at the foundation of the man's
character or what it was that struck the deepest chord
of human nature in the incident ? Then, pervaded
by this thought, he set himself to represent and ex-
press that which belonged to the man or to the inci-

THE ART OF AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 177

dent, and he did express it with an unerring accuracy
and a rarely equalled power. This accuracy was due
to his possessing, along with high ideals, a patience
that grudged no pains. He kept some of his works
for years in his studio after others had thought them
complete, touching and retouching them till they were
brought nearer to the standard of perfection he had
set up. One of his disciples remembers a day when
in modelling an arm for a figure he moulded and threw
away more than twenty attempts to get in the clay
exactly the shape and contour he desired.

Think of any one of his greatest works. Look at
that noble statue of President Lincoln in the park at
Chicago, in which the grandeur of the man transforms
and triumphs over all those difficulties and defects
which the figure and the clothing presented and which
might have appeared inconsistent with Hellenic ideas
of beauty and grace.

Think of that solemn and majestic figure of Sorrow
in the Rock Creek Cemetery here at Washington
which seems by mere form and posture to have suc-
ceeded in expressing what has seldom been expressed
by sculptor or painter, though the greatest masters of
music have been able to express it through sound. It
touches us like a requiem by Mozart or one of those
pieces of Chopin in which the very soul of sadness
seems to speak through the chords.

Think of that infinitely pathetic figure of the young
hero of New England, Robert Shaw, as you see him

178 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

in the bas-relief on the border of Boston Common —
the young hero of New England riding calmly to his
fate at the head of his soldiers, soldiers of another race
just delivered from slavery. The shadow of death
rests already upon him.

Sed nox atra caput tristi circumvolat umbra.*

When you think of works like those, in which the
loftiest imagination has been accompanied with the
most finished grace of execution, you feel how great
a genius it has been the privilege of your age to pos-
sess in the artist whose memory we have met to
honour.

The danger or the weakness which is sometimes
found to accompany this power of imaginative expres-
sion is that it is apt to lapse into something extrava-
gant or sensational. Nothing was farther from Saint-
Gaudens. In that respect he had the balance and
self-restraint, as well as the fine sense of beauty and
measure, which belonged to his Greek masters. It is by
that, we may believe, — by the power of imaginative
conception and expression, combined with calmness and
self-restraint, — that he will live in the admiring mem-
ory of all who love and prize art in ever^^ country.
Most of all will he live in America, which did not, in-
deed, give him birth, but which received him as a
child, which helped him, which cherished him, which
recognized his gifts as though he had been one of her

* Aeneid VI, of the young Marcellus.

THE ART OF AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 179

own children, which gave him those noble subjects from
her own history with which his name will always be
associated. He deserves to be remembered forever
among you as one of the artistic glories of your
country.

i

ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY

Address at a Banquet of the American Institute of Archi-
tects IN Washington, December, 1908.

ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY

Address at a Banquet of the American Institute of Archi-
tects IN Washington, December, 1908.

My first duty is to thank you for the way in which
you have received the toast to which I am desired
to respond. I was touched by the simple manner
in which your President gave the toast, "The King."
He gave it in the same way in which it might have
been given in a.d. 1759 in the North American colonies,
when all patriotic hearts were swelling with pride at
the news of the victory won by WoKe on the Plains of
Abraham and the winning of all North America for the
benefit of those colonies. A good deal of water has
flowed under the bridges of the Potomac since 1759; but
things have got back, so far as relates to spirit and sen-
timent, to what they were just one hundred and fifty
years ago, and I hope and believe that under this new
order of things, when this gigantic Republic has for
more than a century and a quarter managed its affairs
in this continent in its own way, and when for nearly
a century undisturbed peace has existed between Great
Britain and the United States, the ties of sentiment,
feeling, and affection which unite the two branches
of the ancient stock are, and will remain, as deep and

183

1 84 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

as strong as ever they were in the days of poHtical
union.

It is a pleasure to be the guest of the American
Institute of Architects. I have always, as a humble
layman, not understanding the principles and methods
of the splendid art which you practise, but admiring its
results, felt a very keen interest in your profession,
and have thought it must be one of the most agreeable
professions that a man could enter. There is, of course,
one drawback connected with it — that vexation which
an architect must experience when his beautiful designs
for a building, grand in its lines and refined in its
ornament, are frustrated by the unresponsive taste-
lessness and tame ideas of the person for whom the
building is to be erected and who probably prefers
internal comfort to external beauty. That must be
often a source of sore disappointment to you. But
after all, every profession has its drawbacks. Quisque
SMOS patimur Manes. In my own profession, that of
the law, it does sometimes happen that the most elo-
quent speeches which are directed to secure the acquittal
of a guilty man are neglected by a stupid jury. It does
sometimes happen in the profession of medicine that a
person whose malady has been pronounced incurable by
a skilful practitioner subsequently recovers, and that
his recovery is attributed not to the skill of the physician
labouring against hope, but to the strength of the
patient's constitution. It sometimes happens in the
profession of the journalist that the efforts which the

ARCHITECTURE AND fflSTORY 185

reporter who interviews a criminal makes to obtain
absolute accuracy about the details of the crime are
not successful, and that he does not even get credit
for the strenuousness of those efforts. And I confess
it is a serious drawback to the profession of the poli-
tician and legislator that one-half of his time and effort
is apt to be spent, not in securing the passing of good
laws, but in preventing the passing of those laws, be
they good or bad, which the opposite party seeks to
pass.

You, gentlemen (I am reminded of this by my
reference to the transitory character of a great deal of
the work politicians do), have one satisfaction which
belongs to you, as compared with some of those other
professions I have referred to. It is this: You do attain
a solid, visible, tangible result. You produce something.
There is the building. It stands there for the world
to look at, and for yourself to admire. It stands ; it
continues to serve some useful purposes ; it is there as
something definitely attained and effected; and if after
some fifty or sixty years faults in the construction
cause it perchance to totter and fall, by that time it
will have been forgotten who was the architect; and
as for yourself, you will not suffer from any criticism,
because you will be elsewhere, and will no doubt be
enjoying a happiness sufficient to make you entirely
indifferent to criticism.

So I come back to the conclusion that you are, on
the whole, fortunate in your profession. And you have

1 86 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

one other great advantage. You are following a pro-
fession, the study of which, pursued in an aesthetic as
well as scientific spirit all your life through, and con-
sisting largely in examining the masterpieces of archi-
tecture that have been erected before our own time,
and in our own time, is in itself altogether profitable
and delightful.

Now, I cannot honestly say that the whole of the
study of the law is enjoyable. In every system of
law there is much that is artificial. The system of pro-
cedure is full of dreary technicalities which sometimes
obstruct the march of justice. Statutes contain many
arbitrary rules. There are cases which establish prece-
dents that have to be followed because the decision was
so given, although we think them opposed to sound prin-
ciple. But you are not hampered in any such way.
You have to follow principles based on science, and
canons of taste which have been, for the most part,
settled by the practice of the greatest among your
predecessors, while nevertheless leaving ample scope for
your own sense of beauty in their application to the ob-
jects of the building and the conditions of the spot in
which it is to be placed. A large part of 3^our training
consists in the study of the noblest works erected by
men of genius in earlier times. In the study of those
which remain from antiquity in Egypt, Greece, and
Italy, and in the study of the far greater number pro-
duced in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance
in many parts of Europe, you have an ever fresh

I

ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY 187

and undiluted source of pleasure. I can remember no
happier days than I have spent, — and I am sure they
would have been still more happy had it been my good
fortune to possess a special and technical knowledge of
your art, — in examining and sometimes trying to
sketch old churches and old castles and old city walls
and municipal buildings and palaces, especially in the
cities of Italy and Spain. One can hardly think of
any higher or keener enjoyment than lies in seeing
what man has done in the effort to combine beauty
and convenience in buildings meant to endure, and in
following by the light of history the progress of archi-
tecture from Greek and Roman days down to the
eighteenth century, as one sees that progress in Italy,
France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Britain. To
this I may add that your art has a special claim upon
aU who love the past, because it is, more than any
other art, the sister and interpreter of history. There
is nothing that helps so much to a comprehension of
history as the study of the buildings of a country. In
them you see how men faced the conditions of their
life ; you see exactly what they needed in the way of
defence and in the way of comfort ; you see what form
of structure and what internal arrangements the usages
of religion prescribed for houses of worship ; you see
by tracing the type of buildings in each particular prov-
ince or district of a country what were the racial, politi-
cal, and cultural influences that operated upon that
district at the time when the building you are studying

i88 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

was erected ; and you are able, in a word, to make the
buildings of a country illustrate its history and make
its history explain the buildings. Someone ought to
write a manual of travel for those who visit civilized
countries, such as the Manual Francis Galton, compiled
for explorers in wild countries thirty years ago; and
in such a manual there might well be allotted to the
elements of architectural history a chapter sufficiently
full to enable an intelligent observer to find pleasure
in the study of buildings as well as of Nature. It is a
pleasure which has this advantage, that one can hunt
up buildings both in city and in country, whereas in
the city one can pursue no branch of natural his-
tory other than the discovery of microbes, I doubt if
there is anything which could be better done for a stu-
dent of history than to send him on an architectural
tour through France, for instance ; make him learn to
comprehend the Northern, Eastern, and Southern types
of building, and to distinguish between the subdivisions
of these types, and to comprehend what were the influ-
ences that gave one character to the churches of Lorraine
or of Burgundy, let us say, and other characters to those
of Provence or Aquitaine. How interesting it is to com-
pare the Romanesque of Germany with the more gener-
ally graceful Romanesque of France and the perhaps
almost more perfect work of the same age in the
churches of such a Spanish city as Avila. Everj'where
the buildings interpret the age and the age interprets
the buildings.

ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY 189

When one thinks of all the exquisite monuments of
architectural genius which adorn such a country as
Italy or France, one has to remember that they repre-
sent the accumulated ingenuity and skill and labour
and taste of many generations of men. No one of
those generations of men ever had such opportunities
as architects both here and in England have during
the last sixty years enjoyed. It is true that artistic
designers of the last sixty years have not had quite so
free a field as we assume that your predecessors had in
the Renaissance, because they have been more ham-
pered by committees, boards of trustees, municipal
councils and other authorities who cannot realize, as
did Lorenzo the Magnificent at Florence or King John
III of Portugal, or other equally large-minded princes,
that the great architect ought to have carte blanche
for the building he has planned. But, except as re-
spects that difficulty, you have enjoyed in this country,
and in western Europe also, extraordinary opportunities
during more than half a century of economic prosperity.
Never, I suppose, was there a time when so many
edifices, and so many large and important edifices,
were erected, when there was so general an interest in
building, and when so much money was lavishly
spent in bricks and mortar. In England we de-
veloped some seventy years ago a sudden access of
zeal in ecclesiastical matters which not only covered
the outskirts of our growing cities with new churches,
but set people to the repairing of old churches. And I

igo UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

grieve to have to confess that this zeal has in one way-
worked for evil rather than good. We have committed
a crime which you here could not commit — I hope
that even if the opportunity had presented itself, you
would not have committed it, but have resisted the
temptation. Anyhow, the opportunity did not come to
you ; and to us it did come, and we, purely from want
of thought, yielded to the temptation. We have been
restoring not only some of our cathedrals, but many of
our ancient parish churches, — of which there were
more that had come down untouched from before
the Reformation of the sixteenth century than any
other country could boast, — and having sometimes
restored them almost out of recognition, we have un-
fortunately obliterated a great deal of the history that
was written in those churches. The same thing has
happened in France, but not so widely, because not so
much interest has been taken there in the parish
churches. Some of the French cathedrals, however,
have suffered more seriously than any English cathe-
dral. The vast and splendid cathedral church of
Perigueux, probably the grandest building of Byzantine
character north of the Alps, has been so transformed
by restoration that it is practically impossible to
discover the features it had half a century ago. As
regards England, it was not till after much irreparable
harm had been done that between twenty and thirty
years ago an enlightened band of scholars and artists,
the most energetic and conspicuous of whom was

ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY igi

the poet William Morris, took the field and exerted
themselves to rouse the public and to stop, as far as
possible, the process of transmogrifying an old church
into something that was neither new nor old, but a hope-
less jumble. The work of ruin has now been checked,
but the harm already done is a calamity to weep over.
Here you have not had ancient buildings to injure, and
historical feeling has made you spare most of the build-
ings that possessed any sort of interest and dated
more than a century back.

This, however, is a digression. I return to the main
subject by observing that neither in England nor any-
where in western Europe has full use been made of
the opportunities for the display of original genius in
architecture which the expenditure of vast sums of
money on the erection of an immense number of build-
ings provided. We have not succeeded there, nor any
more do architects in Germany or France seem to have
succeeded, in evolving anything that can be called a
new style distinctive of our age. When we look back
upon every century from the end of the eighteenth to
the beginnings of the West European Romanesque type
of building in the tenth or eleventh century, we see that
the buildings of almost every age show something that
is characteristic of the time, some forms which at once
denote to us the date of the work. But if we look at
the work of our own and of the last century — and the
same thing is as generally true in France and Germany
as in Britain — we see a motley array of all sorts of

192 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

different styles, from the eleventh century to the eigh-
teenth. I speak chiefly of ecclesiastical architecture,
for of course in private residences and municipal
buildings some styles are less convenient for practical
purposes than others. Efforts are sometimes made
to combine the features of different styles, but this
eclecticism is seldom successful, and the total result
in beautiful and impressive buildings is not worthy of
the amount of knowledge and pains that has been
devoted to the work as a whole and of the amount of
money that has been spent upon it. Some fine things
have been produced, but few in proportion to the
whole.

Neither have you here in the United States developed
any characteristically American style of building since
the so-called " colonial " type of pre-Revolutionary
days. There is no style distinctive of the different
sections of the country, except a few traces of Spanish
work in Santa Fe (in New Mexico), and here and
there in California, and a touch of French influence
in the older parts of New Orleans. Nowhere in the
western world does one find any parallel to the long
architectural history of Europe or of India. Even
in Spanish America, where people built from the first
in stone, whereas your ancestors built in wood, there
is little variety. Nearly all the churches and pubHc
buildings vary but little from the prevalent sixteenth
century type which the Spaniards brought with them
from Europe. Will this be alwa}^s so, or ^^all you of

ARCHITECTURE AND fflSTORY 193

the New World, after two, three or four centuries, de-
velop one or more styles characteristic of America,
and offer to the historians of a stUl distant future a
field of study like that which the Old World presents
to us now ?

Here in the United States you seem to have made
one new departure in which you have gone ahead
of us Europeans. Your designs for houses in cities,
and perhaps even more for suburban houses and sea-
side cottages, have more variety, more freshness, more
charm than the designs of those descriptions have in
most parts of Europe. You have certainly made more
use in cities of some of the earlier mediaeval forms of
architecture than we have succeeded in doing in Eng-
land, and in that respect your recent work may
show more originality than ours does. But still, you
would probably agree that you have not yet succeeded
either in inventing a new style, which perhaps may
(for all we laymen know) be impossible, — for, after
all, the possibilities of invention are limited, — or
in so combining and harmonizing some of the features
of different styles as to make one which shall be dis-
tinctive of the nineteenth or twentieth century. Now
that is just what the students of history would be now
looking out for and longing for, if there were grounds
for expecting it. Three or four hundred years hence,
when the student follows the course of the develop-
ment of architecture from the tenth century to his
own time, he will find, as he descends the stream of

194 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

time to the eighteenth, that there is a regular succes-
sion of forms of construction and decoration, and that
he can approximately fix the date of a building by its
general style and structure as well as by its mouldings
and its ornaments. But when he comes to the
nineteenth century he would be completely at a loss.
He will find that of three churches erected about the
same time, one was designed to reproduce the style of
the twelfth century, another that of the fifteenth, a
third that of the seventeenth. So the historically
minded layman feels, when he tries to project himself
into the position of an historian living in the twenty-
fourth century, that this latter would rejoice to be
able to realize what the twentieth century had been
doing through its buildings as we to-day realize what
the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries did.

There is, at any rate, a wide field still open in this
country for inventive genius. You have had several
architects of unquestioned genius, and mil doubtless
have more. Your wealth, the growth of your popula-
tion, your noble contempt for expense, your bold-
ness and grandeur of conception are kno\Mi to all men
on both sides of the Atlantic.

The new Central Station at Washington, \vith its
two long vaulted halls, is as fine as anything of the kind
in Europe. Still vaster and more majestic are the halls
of the station which the Pennsylvania railroad company
is erecting in New York. I have seen magnificent
plans for the decoration of Washington ; I have seen a

ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY 195

still more wonderful plan for the building of a new
Chicago out in the lake, a plan which we in England, or
indeed people anywhere in Europe, would not be able to
consider on the score of cost. But expense has for you
no terrors. I will not say that there is nothing that
Congress will not do for Washington, because I am
told that you and other men of light and leading have
projects looking to the beautifying of Washington for
which Congress is still hesitating to vote the money
required ; but I know that there is nothing that Chicago
fears to do if it will increase the splendour of that great
city, and I dare say that is true of many other cities also.
He who marvels at the gigantic schemes that are being
attempted in New York and Chicago, is ready to believe
that there is no enterprise designed for the benefit of
such great communities from which its liberal and
large-minded citizens will recoil on the score of cost.

I congratulate you, therefore, not only on the attrac-
tions of the profession to which you belong, but on the
great opportunities which are open to you. We shall
watch you from our side of the Atlantic without any
jealousy of your superior wealth, but with admiration
of your energy and with high hopes of what you will
achieve for the adornment of those enormous cities
which have sprung up on the North American
Continent.

THE CHARACTER AND CAREER OF
ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Delivered at the Celebration of the Centenary of the
Birth of Abraham Lincoln, at Springfield, Illinois, Feb-
ruary 12, 1909.

THE CHARACTER AND CAREER OF
ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Delivered at the Celebration of the Centenary of the
Birth of Abraham Lincoln, at Springfield, Illinois, Feb-
ruary 12, 1909.

You are met to commemorate a great man, one of
your greatest, great in what he did, even greater in
what he was. One hundred years have passed since in
that lowly hut in the neighbouring state of Kentucky
this child of obscure and unlettered parents was born
into a country then still wild and thinly peopled.
Three other famous men were born in that same year
in England : Alfred Tennyson, the most gifted poet
who has used our language since Wordsworth died;
William Gladstone, the most powerful, versatile, and
high-minded statesman of the last two generations in
Britain; and Charles Darwin, the greatest naturalist
since Linnaeus, and chief among the famous scientific
discoverers of the nineteenth century. It was a won-
derful year, and one who knew these three illustrious
Englishmen whom I have named is tempted to speak
of them and compare and contrast each one of them
with that illustrious contemporary of theirs whose
memory we are met to honour. He quitted this

199

200 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

world long before them, but with a record of great
work done to which a long life could scarcely have
added any further lustre.

Of the personal impression he made on those who
knew him, you will hear from some of the few yet
living who can recollect him. All I can contribute
is a reminiscence of what reached us in England.
I was an undergraduate student in the Univer-
sity of Oxford when the Civil War broke out. Well do
I remember the surprise we felt when the Republican
national convention nominated him as candidate for
the Presidency, for his name was hardly known on our
side of the Atlantic, and it had been expected that the
choice would fall upon William H. Seward. I recol-
lect how it slowly dawned upon Europeans in 1862
and 1863 that the President could be no ordinary man,
because he never seemed cast down by the reverses
which befell his armies ; because he never let himself
be hurried into premature action, and because he did
not fear to take so bold a step as was the Emancipa-
tion Proclamation when he saw that the right moment
had arrived. And above all I remember the shock of
awe and grief which thrilled all Britain when the news
came that he had perished by the bullet of an assassin.
There have been not a few murders of the heads of
states in our time, but none smote us with such
horror and such pity as the death of this strong and
merciful man, just when his long and patient efforts
had been crowned with victory, and peace was begin-

THE CHARACTER AND CAREER OF LINCOLN 201

ning to shed her rays over a land laid waste by the
march of armies.

We in England then already felt that a great as
well as a good man had departed, though it remained
for later years to enable us all (both you here and us
in the other hemisphere) fully to appreciate his great-
ness. Both among you and with us his fame has con-
tinued to rise till he has now become one of the grand-
est figures whom America has given to World history, to
be a glory first of this country, then also of mankind.

A man may be great by intellect or by character
or by both. The highest men are great by both;
and of these was Abraham Lincoln. Endowed with
powers that were soHd rather than shining, he was not
what is called a brilliant personality. Perhaps the
want of instruction and stimiilation during his early
life prevented his naturally vigorous mind from learning
how to work nimbly. Yet the disadvantages of his
boyhood, the want of books and of teachers and of the
society of men with powers comparable to his own,
were all so met and overcome by his love of knowledge
and his strenuous will that he drew strength from them.
Thoughtfulness and intensity, the capacity to reflect
steadily and patiently on a problem till it has been
solved, is one of the two most distinct impressions
which one gets from that strong, rugged face with its
furrowed brow and deep-set eyes.

The other impression is that of unshaken and un-
shakable resolution. Slow in reaching a decision, he

202 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

held fearlessly to it when he had reached it. He had
not merely physical courage, and that in ample meas-
ure, but the rarer quality of being willing to face
misconception and unpopularity. It was his un-
daunted firmness and his clear thinking that fitted
Lincoln to be the pilot who brought your ship through
the wildest tempest that ever broke upon her.

Three points should not be forgotten which, if they
do not add to Lincoln's greatness, make it more winning
and attractive. One is the fact that he rose aU unaided
to the pinnacle of power and responsibility. Rarely in-
deed has it happened in history, hardly at all could it
have happened in the last century outside America, that
one born in poverty, with no help throughout his youth
from intercourse with educated people, with no friend
to back him except those whom the impression of his
own character drew around him, should so rise. A
second is the gentleness of his heart. He who has
to refuse every hour requests from those whom a pri-
vate person would have been glad to indulge, he who
has to punish those whom a private person would
pity and pardon, can seldom retain either tenderness
or patience. But Lincoln's tenderness and patience
were inexhaustible.

It is often said that every great man is imscrupulous,
and doubtless most of those to whom usage has attached
the title have been so. To preserve truthfulness and
conscientiousness appears scarcely possible in the stress
of life where immense issues seem to make it neces-

THE CHARACTER AND CAREER OF LINCOLN 203

sary, and therefore to make it right, to toss aside the
ordinary rules of conduct in order to secure the end de-
sired. To Abraham Lincohi, however, truthfulness
and conscientiousness remained the rule of life. He
felt and owned his responsibility not only to the peo-
ple, but to a higher power. Few rulers who have
wielded Kke power amid like temptations have so stain-
less a record.

To you, men of Illinois, Lincoln is the most famous
and worthy of all those who have adorned your Com-
monwealth. To you, citizens of the United States, he
is the President who carried you through a terrible
conflict and saved the Union. To us in England, he
is one of the heroes of the race whence you and we
spring. We honour his memory as you do, and it is
fitting that one who is privileged here to represent the
land from which his forefathers came should bring,
on behalf of England, a tribute of admiration for
him and of thankfulness to the Providence which
gave him to you in your hour of need.

Great men are the noblest possession of a nation
and are potent forces in the moulding of national char-
acter. Their influence lives after them, and, if they
be good as well as great, they remain as beacons light-
ing the course of all who follow them. They set for
succeeding generations the standards of the youth
who seek to emulate their virtues in the service of the
country. Thus did the memory of George Washing-
ton stir and rouse Lincoln himself. Thus wiU the

204 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

memory of Lincoln live and endure among you, gath-
ering reverence from age to age, the memory of one
who saved your republic by his wisdom, his con-
stancy, his faith in the people and in freedom; the
memory of a plain and simple man, yet crowned with
the knightly virtues of truthfulness, honour, and
courage.

THE SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND

IN AMERICA

/
Address Delivered to the Scotch-Irish Society of Pennsyl-
vania, February, 1909.

THE SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND
IN AMERICA

Address Delivered to the Scotch-Irish Society of Pennsyl-
vania, February, 1909.

Whoever v^anders hither and thither over the United
States, as the occupant of the post I hold is expected to
do, finds no small pleasure in noting hov^^ the various
racial stocks that have planted themselves in the United
States, and nov^ make up its population, love to com-
memorate each its ovv^n race and the land whence it
came. To remember Germany or Norway or Sweden or
Scotland or Ireland does not make a man any the less
a good American citizen, and it adds to the interest of
his life and to the width of his outlook over the world
that he should feel he has another land, another race, an-
other literature, other historical traditions, with which he
can associate his memories and his sympathies. The
man of German extraction has Goethe and SchiUer to
be proud of, and is the more drawn to retain or to learn
their tongue ; the Icelander or Norwegian may read the
ancient Sagas of his land and stir his soul by recalling
the exploits of the heroes of Viking days. So even for
a stock like the Scoto-Irish which has for centuries been
a part of the British race and speaks the English tongue
it is weU that societies like yours should exist to recall

207

2o8 UNIVERSITY AND fflSTORICAL ADDRESSES

and emphasize the further and more special tie which
binds you to one part of the British Isles besides that
tie which all Americans, of whatever origin, have to
our island realm, in language and literature, in tradi-
tions and institutions.

Now, gentlemen, before I come to speak of this Scotch-
Irish, let me say in passing that it might very nearly
have been a Dutch-Irish Society. It is said that there
was a time near the end of the sixteenth century when
the Dutch of the United Provinces, being then very
hard pressed by Spain, received an offer from the
English government that if they would abandon Hol-
land and sail off in ships that were to be provided
for them, they should be settled in Ireland and there
receive plenty of land and every encouragement. The
Might Have Beens of history are always an interesting
topic of speculation. Had the British offer been ac-
cepted, the incoming Dutch would, as Protestants,
have in two generations blent with the EngHsh and
Scotch elements. Ireland might have been a half
Dutch country, and the whole subsequent history of
the island would have been different. Whether it
would have been a history of peaceful progress I will
not now enquire — one always walks over hot ashes in
discussing Irish history — but it might weU have been
more happy than were the annals of Ireland during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet what
Ireland might have gained by the addition to her
population, then far less than the island could support.

SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 209

of a valuable and industrious element, Continental
Europe would have lost, and the East too would have
lost, for there might have been no Dutch Empire there.

Let those things be as they were, or as they might
have been, the historian cannot but rejoice to see that
you in the United States take so keen a pleasure in
recalling the different racial stocks from which you
come. This sort of cormection with the Old World,
a connection which some of you are too apt to forget,
because it is a fault of our time to ignore the past and
think that it does not matter, adds to the interest of
your life in the New. It adds to the richness of your
own thoughts and memories that you are able to go
back from the country in which fate and the wander-
ings of your parents have placed you, and connect
yourselves with some particular part of the Old World
and with its history and its associations. You look
backward to two very remarkable stocks. Your posi-
tion is exceptional because you look back not to one
stock but to two. As Scotch-Irish, you are the off-
spring of two races : one of them — the Irish — is
Celtic; the other, the Scottish, is half Celtic and half
Teutonic, for the people of Scotland are a blend of
two Teutonic elements, the AngHan and the Norse,
with two Celtic elements, the Gaelic and the Cymric.
(There are also the Picts, but you will not expect me
to venture to say who the Picts were.)

I do not suppose that there ever were two peoples
who, considering how small were their numbers, have

2IO UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

made a greater noise in the world than the Irish and
Scotch, and you claim kinship with and descent from
both of those, the Scotch element probably contribut-
ing most of the blood.

Like other great and good things, both the Irish and
the Scotch peoples have had their detractors. Criti-
cisms have been passed upon them. It has been said of
the one race that it was reckless, dashing, bold, extrava-
gant, imprudent. It has been said of the other race that
it was dry, cautious, even parsimonious. I wiU not stop
to enquire whether these charges are justly brought
against either, for the sufi&cient reason that you are
neither pure Scotch nor pure Irish, but a blend of both,
and I never heard any charge whatever against the
blend, except that of having "an unco guid conceit" of
itself. On the contrary, it is well understood — all
those historians whose tales of your settlement here
and achievements for America I have perused seem to
agree — that the Scotch-Irish or Irish-Scotch, which-
ever way you like to have it, combine the characteristic
virtues of both the races, that they unite the tenacity,
perseverance, and shrewdness of the Scotsman of Alban
with the fire, dash, and geniality of the Celt of Erin, and
that these are the qualities which have made them
valued not only in the United Kingdom, as I shall
presently show you, but also in this land of their adop-
tion. So far as my own personal observation goes they
have really only two defects, and those defects may be
deemed to be rather the excess of good qualities. You,

I

SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 211

Mr, President, referred to the experience I had when for
fourteen months it was my duty and function, not a
Hght one, to be virtually responsible for the government
of Ireland and for the maintenance of law and order
there. I found then that there were only two slight
defects that could be charged against the peo-
ple of Ireland, especially of the north of Ireland,
from which your ancestors came. One was that
they valued so highly the right of free speech that they
were in the habit of expressing their views of politics,
church history, and theology, and especially their opin-
ions about one another, at regularly recurring mo-
ments, and they used to choose for those moments
anniversaries which long habit had associated with party
passions. The Protestants chose the 12th of July, the
anniversary of the battle of Aughrim, and the Roman
Catholics chose the 1 7th of March, a day which ought
not to have gathered to itself any partisan associations,
because it belongs to a saint, a Briton by birth, who
had a sweet and saintly character, and cherished no
animosity except to poisonous reptiles. On these oc-
casions historical sentiment, a good thing enough at
proper times, frequently gave rise to scenes that were
not altogether peaceful, because the other defect I have
referred to — which might again be described as the ex-
cess of a virtue, — their manly readiness to face danger
on behalf of their opinions, led them to be decidedly
more combative than was necessary or conducive to the
peace of the country.

212 UNIVERSITY AND fflSTORICAL ADDRESSES

It was often my painful duty, since I recognized the
maintenance of order to be the first and most obvious
duty of my ofiice, to warn each party that they must
not hold meetings in places where there was Hkely to
be an armed collision with the other party, and even
to direct a force of police to be present at spots where
it was probable that collisions would occur and that
combats would follow; nor was this duty the easier
because partisans on each side attacked the Govern-
ment whether it permitted or prohibited the meeting.
But it all — meetings and prohibitions, and even colli-
sions — went along with very little of real bitterness,
one might almost say with a certain measure of good
humour; and no one who does not know Ireland can
know with how much good humour its people can, as
soon as the actual fighting is over, look back upon
the conflicts of the factions. Strong language and
even a little fighting are understood to be part of the
game which the parties have been accustomed to play,
and there is much less of bad blood and ill feehng left
behind than people in England suppose. Ireland
is, after all, a very charming and winning country.
Factions in Ireland do not really hate one another as
outsiders are apt to fancy. They have been fighting,
more or less, for over two centuries, and have got ac-
customed to it, and take it less seriously than is sup-
posed by those who are not to the manner born. Some-
times I used to think that those who denounced a
Chief Secretary for prohibiting a meeting or procession

SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 213

would have been disappointed, and would indeed have
thought poorly of him, if he had not issued the prohibi-
tion. To issue it was expected from him, and, as you
might say, was understood to be his part of the game.
Anyone who has to govern Ireland is likely to come in
for plenty of criticism, and will receive most of it when
he tries to be absolutely just and impartial, for then
both sides fire into him. But at the same time he is cer-
tain to leave the country with sincere regret, feeling that
he has enjoyed his time there, and loving the people even
more than he did before. That was my experience.

Now this tendency to pugnacity for which your
ancestors in Ireland, especially in the north of Ireland,
were famous, was the same quality that led the Scoto-
Irish settlers when they came over here to press to the
front, and to take up the borderland of Pennsylvania,
protecting the more peaceful Quakers and German
Moravians who lived between them and the sea, and
choosing for themselves the arduous task of subduing
the wilderness and defending the frontiers of civiliza-
tion against the Indian tribes. And a very fine record
they made. Many of the most stalwart and daring
men of whom this country holds memory were the
original settlers of northern and western Pennsylvania,
the fathers of the men who passed from Pennsylvania
across the mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee, and
southward into western Virginia and the Carolinas and
Georgia. A great deal of the best blood, and a great
deal of the finest intellect that has shown itself in the

214 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

history of the southern United States is due to the men
who sprang from that stock.

They came hither for a reason which deserves to win
sympathy and respect for them. The earhest settlers of
New England left Old England in order to have hberty
to worship God in their own way, and the earhest
settlers who came to Pennsylvania from Ulster came
out because, having been brought over from Scot-
land on a promise of land and good treatment in the
north of Ireland, they found themselves ill treated and
almost persecuted by the Episcopahan government in
the Ireland of that day, a day of general religious
intolerance. They did not get such good conditions of
land tenure as they expected; and, what galled them
far more, they were not able to obtain that fuU freedom
and equality for the exercise of their religion and their
civil rights which they were entitled to count on. That
was one main cause why they emigrated to these colonies,
and one main cause also why they were foremost in
vindicating the claims of the colonists when trouble
arose between the latter and the mother country. It is,
moreover, an interesting historical fact that the system
of Presbyterian church government which these settlers
brought with them had much to do ^^dth the formation
of a republican spirit in this country and mth the growth
of those habits which enabled your ancestors to work
republican institutions. The machinery of that system
is eminently republican, for it consists of representative
councils, leading up to a supreme representative body,

SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 215

the General Assembly. The traditions and habits it
had formed proved useful when your forefathers began
here to organize the constitutional bases of your Com-
monwealths, One of the foremost champions of the
claims of the colonial insurgents was a Scotch Presby-
terian minister, John Witherspoon, president of Prince-
ton College and one of the signers of the Declaration
of Independence.

You have heard so often of the Scotch Irishmen who
have attained eminence in the United States that I need
say but few words regarding them. It is a long list,
even if you omit one alleged to have belonged to the
Scoto-American race, Captain Kidd, the famous, or
notorious, pirate. One may count four, five, or per-
haps even six. Presidents, and you have some claim —
I am not sure of its strength — - to a man greater than
any of those Presidents, Chief Justice John Marshall,
as belonging to the stock. But the persons who have
figured most in American history have been the fiery
rhetorician Patrick Henry, the combative and some-
times headstrong Andrew Jackson, and the still more
remarkable John C. Calhoun, whose relentless logic
gave to South Carolina the impulse that made her
ultimately the leader in Secession. Calhoun applied to
politics a thoroughly Calvinistic line of thought, though
whether it was Calvinistic theology that formed the
logical precision and liking for a stringent symmetry
of doctrine that belong to the Scottish mind, or
whether the Scots took to Calvinistic theology be-

2i6 UNIVERSITY AND mSTORICAL ADDRESSES

cause it suited their natural taste and bent, might
be a subject of enquiry for the curious. In these
men the Hneaments of the race from which you spring
were unmistakable. In its later ornaments they are
less evident. Take the race all in all, it has deserved
well of the United States. I will not dwell upon the
inventors, like Robert Fulton, nor upon the many
estimable clergymen, local leaders of opinion, who
edified their congregations at a length which com-
manded admiration in those days as much as it would
repel the weaklings of our own time. But let us not
forget to pay a respectful tribute to the men, clerical
and lay, who worked for education with the true Scot-
tish spirit, and also to the pioneers who went out, south-
ward and westward, from Pennsylvania, tough and
valiant men, prepared to face the hardships of a lonely
life and the perils of the wilderness, carrying mth them
into it nothing but their axe and their gun and their
Bible, ready to spend their lives in winning for those
who came after, that security which you now enjoy.

It was a strong race, one of the strongest that has
gone to the making of this now composite nation, in
which it is beginning to be hard to trace the several
threads that have been woven on the loom of Time into
the tissue. Some students of history have wdshed that
each racial stock of settlers, Irish and Germans and
Scandinavians and Italians and Poles had each been
left to occupy a region by itself, where its old idiosyn-
crasy could have been developed under new conditions

SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 217

into new forms which would yet have retained a touch
of the old quality. But perhaps the mingling of all to-
gether into one vast nation gives to that nation more
flexibility and versatility, and makes it fitter to meet
the var3dng calls of a civilization which grows always
more complex.

Now let me turn to the Scotch-Irish in their earlier
home. Having spent part of my boyhood in Ulster
and frequently revisited it, I may be able to tell you
something about your Ulster forefathers. When I first
knew the north of Ireland there were a large number of
people there who spoke broad Scotch, just the same
broad Scotch that you would have then heard in Ayrshire
or Galloway, and who considered themselves to be for
every purpose Scotch, so much so that in the years be-
tween 1845 and 1850 I have heard many an old farmer
in the County of Down or the County of Antrim talk
of the Roman Catholic Irish who inhabited the moun-
tainous districts, such as the Glens of Antrim and the
Mourne Mountains, into which the Scottish immigrants
had rather unceremoniously driven them, as "Those
Irish," or (to be quite literal) in broad Scotch they said,
"Thae Eerish." In Down and Antrim they inter-
married but little with the native Celtic population,
because the latter were nearly all Roman Catholics, but
there was in those days a less pronounced antagonism
between the Scoto-Irish Presbyterian and the Roman
Catholic than has grown up in later days, though even
now that antagonism is not so sharp as most people

2i8 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

outside Ireland suppose. In the days I speak of, the
Presbyterians had not forgotten the league of the United
Irishmen and the insurrection of 1798, in which many
of their strongest men took part, having been drawn
to common action with the Roman Catholics by the
misgovernment from which they both suffered. Some
of the Presbyterian Liberals of that generation used
to say that if the Roman Catholic insurgents of south-
ern Ireland had been as well organized and had fought
as well as the Protestant insurgents of the north, the
insurrection might have had a fair chance of success.

Otherwise the people of Antrim and Down had Httle
or nothing to do with Dublin, the capital of Ireland, or
indeed with any part of Ireland south of Carlingford
Lough. They considered themselves to be Scotch, and
all their social and commercial relations were "with Scot-
land. Their trading was done with Glasgow or other
ports of the west of Scotland. Their sons who were
to be prepared for the ministry or any other learned
profession were sent to Glasgow University. In fact,
they were then a little colony of Scotch people planted
in the Counties of Down and Antrim and in parts
of Derry and Tyrone. I knew, sixty years ago, old
Presbyterian elders in County Do\\ti who were as
purely Scotch as if they had lived in Kirkintilloch
or Kilwinning, but such men would hardly be found
there to-day.

That, however, is compatible with our recognizing
that among those who migrated to America in the

SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 219

eighteenth century, a good many purely Celtic names
may be found, and that in many a Celtic quahty was
present. A certain number of the Scots who migrated
to Ulster intermarried with the Celtic Irish in Derry
and Tyrone, and a certain number of aboriginal Irish
became Protestants and as such joined the Scoto-Irish
Presbyterian body. There was, moreover, in those who
went from Scotland to Ulster and came from Ulster
hither a good deal of Gaelic blood. The West Highlands
sent Campbells and Macfarlanes and Macmillans and
Colquhouns, and there were plenty of Macs from Gal-
loway. That corner of Scotland was the original home
of most of those Macs who were at one time so numer-
ous in Pennsylvania that some one complained of the
"Macocracy" that was in control there. However,
whether it is Celtic blood, or whether the spirit of the
land itself breathes something new into them, certain it
is that the Scotch-Irish as you find them in Ulster now
are quite different from the Scotch. Nobody who knows
the Scotch people weU could to-day mistake, when
he goes into Ulster, its people for Scotsmen, and when
you meet an Ulsterman in England or Scotland, you
at once recognize him not only by his accent, though
that is even more different from the brogue of southern
Ireland than it is from Lowland Scotch, but also by
something distinctive in his way of thinking and acting.
Even a man's face and manner will often indicate that
he is not the same sort of person as a man from the
Scottish lowlands.

220 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

As you claim that the Scotch-Irish have given
many men of high distinction and usefulness to this
country, so they have given many men of great fame
and honour and service to the United Kingdom. It will
sufi&ce to mention five who belonged to the last genera-
tion. One of them was the late Lord Chief Justice of
England, who was, when at the bar, one of the most
powerful advocates of our time, a strong, if not a very
learned judge, — Sir Charles Russell, afterwards Lord
Russell of Killowen, whose name is no doubt known to
many of you who follow the profession of the law. He
was an Irish Roman Catholic. The other four were
Irish Protestants. One of them was Sir Henry
Lawrence, one of the most gallant of our soldiers and
the heroic defender of Lucknow in the terrible Indian
mutiny of 1857. There were three others even more
famous. One was Lord Lawrence, brother of Sir
Henry, who was, with the possible exception of the
Scottish Lord Dalhousie, the ablest of all our Indian
administrators and viceroys for the last eighty or one
hundred years. The second was Lord Cairns, one of the
most finished masters of legal science in England the
nineteenth century saw, a most powerful parliamentary
speaker, a great advocate and a still greater judge.
The third was the grandson of a Presbyterian farmer
near the village of Ballynahinch, in County Down,
whose son had become professor of mathematics in Glas-
gow. This was William Thomson, afterwards known
as Lord Kelvin, and one of the first scientific men of the

I

SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 221

century. The last time I ever sat by him at dinner he
told me that his father had, when a boy, been forced by
the insurgents of 1798 to carry food to them just before
the battle of Ballynahinch. There were no three men
who stood higher, or who deserved to stand higher, in
the sight of England and Scotland during the second
half of the nineteenth century than Lord Lawrence,
Lord Cairns, and Lord Kelvin. Those three men came
from the counties of Derry, Antrim, and Down. So
you see that in England and Scotland also your people
can claim to have done great things. Your forefathers,
when they left Ulster, did not take away all the strength
and vigour of the old stock, which continues to show
its quality there just as it has done here.

You look back, as I have said, to two countries as
the sources of that mixed race from which you sprang.
How different has been the fortune of those two coun-
tries ! ' Scotland had her troubled times, and she passed
out of them, and since the union with England, with
the short and unimportant exceptions of the Jacobite
rebellions in 1715 and 1745, Scotland has enjoyed peace
and an ever growing prosperity, and although at one
time the Scotch excited a little criticism and even dis-
taste in England, as you may remember from the
growlings and girdings at them of that fine old t}^ical
Englishman, Dr. Samuel Johnson, still the Scotch have
made good their footing in England. They have suc-
ceeded in getting a fair chance at anything there is to
win or enjoy. It is no disadvantage to any Scotchman

222 UNIVERSITY AND fflSTORICAL ADDRESSES

who comes to England if he desires to rise to any Eng-
Hsh office or emolument. Four out of the last five prime
ministers of England were Scotchmen. The present
Archbishop of York and the present Archbishop of
Canterbury, primate of England, are both Scotchmen.
So you may see that the Scotchman has a free field open
to him in England. Scotland has been, in her union
with England, a happy and prosperous country. I
wish I could say the same for Ireland. Ireland, too,
has given many great and famous men to England be-
sides those Ulstermen whose names I mentioned to
you just now. There have been no orators more illus-
trious, few indeed so illustrious, in the long line of Eng-
lish oratory and statesmanship, as four Irishmen who
flourished at the end of the eighteenth century, Curran,
Plunkett, Grattan, and, above all, Edmund Burke, per-
haps the only person in modern times who was not only
a great statesman and orator but also one of the greatest
prose writers of his day. Any country that produced
four men like Curran, Plunkett, Grattan, and Burke,
and produced them all practically in the same genera-
tion, has rendered a service to England and to the glory
of the English tongue which Englishmen and Americans
ought never to forget. I might speak also of many
famous lights of literature, such as Swift, Sheridan, and
Goldsmith, to whom the Island of the Saints has given
birth; but everyone admits what Ireland has achieved
in those directions. No more against Irishmen than
against Scotsmen is there now any prejudice in England.

SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 223

England is too great to be ungenerous ; she can afford
to give credit to all the smaller sister nationalities for
all the contributions they have made to the common
greatness of the nation.

And yet there are many painful pages in the history of
the relations of Ireland and England. I am glad, there-
fore, to tell you, as I am sure that your sympathy con-
tinues to extend itself to Ireland, and that your hearts
beat for Ireland as one of the two countries to which
your ancestors belonged, that I believe a better day
has dawned for that island, and especially for the rela-
tions between her and England. Within the last thirty
years there has come about an understanding and a
sympathy between the great mass and body of the
British people and the Irish people such as never ex-
isted before. Few people on this side the Atlantic
realize how much the British parliament has done of
late years to ameliorate by better legislation and by
liberal grants of money what was once the lamentable
condition of the Irish peasantry. No one who knew
Ireland fifty years ago can travel through it now without
being struck by the enormous improvements effected.
Dwellings have been erected for the labourers all over the
country. The people are better fed and better clothed.
They have money in the savings banks, and their children
are at school. At this moment nearly half the land of
Ireland has passed, and within the next twenty years I
believe practically the whole of the land of Ireland will
have passed, into the hands of the small farmers of Ireland

224 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

who are cultivating it, and therewith that land hunger
and those land disputes which have been the most fruit-
ful source of trouble and discontent in Ireland will have
been assuaged and set at rest.

The British people are now genuinely anxious and
wishful to do all they can for the Irish people, and I
believe the Irish people have come to understand it.
In Ireland there is no longer that bitterness towards
the English which once existed, and it surprises me
to find how little some Irishmen and sons of Irishmen
here in the United States understand the change for
the better that has come to pass. It is true that those
who cherish the old rancour are now comparatively few,
but it is a pity that there should be any who retain
sentiments for which there was ground fifty years ago,
but for which there is none to-day. In Ireland itself,
as well as in England, there is assuredly a far better
and more kindly feeling than ever there was before,
and we confidently look forward to the time when, just
as the memory of ancient wars no longer impairs the
friendship of Englishmen and Scotchmen, so the dissen-
sions that in the past have divided Ireland and England
and produced recurrent strife in Ireland herself ■\\'ill have
been forgotten, and both will be contented and friendly
members of one and the same great Empire. Is it not
a great blessing for any country when it can feel itself
to be truly united, one in fact as well as in name ?
Happy and strong is that country which can remember
the struggles and conflicts of the past only as a record

SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 225

of deeds of valour and self-sacrifice, and can bring all
its children together to unite in honouring the heroes
of the past, to whichever side or party they belonged.
That happened long ago as between Scotland and
England; nations that strove fiercely against one an-
other for three hundred years. That has been your
good fortune here in the United States. I was pro-
foundly struck by this last week, when I went to
Springfield to honour the memory of Abraham Lincoln
on the centenary of his birth. It was impressive to see
how, not only there in his own State of Illinois, and in
the city where he had made his home, but everywhere
over the country, there went up, from the banks of the
Delaware here in Philadelphia to the banks of the Colum-
bia in Oregon, one voice of admiration for that noble
character, and one offering of thankfulness to the Provi-
dence that had bestowed him on you. But what gave
the greatest pleasure of all to those who wish well to
your country was to perceive that no discordant note
came from the South, and that in many parts of the
South, and from many eminent spokesmen of the South,
there was reechoed praise and honour to the memory
of Abraham Lincoln. So may it ever be in this country,
and so may it be in my country, too, that England,
Ireland, and Scotland shall be able to honour not only
our common heroes, but the heroes of each particular
nation also, and that those who hereafter win the fame
of heroes may win it in the service of our common
country.

WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE

Address Delivered at the University of California in the
Greek Theatre on Charter Day, March 23, 1909.

WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE

Address Delivered at the University of California in the
Greek Theatre on Charter Day, March 23, 1909.

Each time I come to California — and this is the
third time — I am struck more and more by the fact
that Cahfornia is not only one of the greatest States
of the Union, but is also, unlike any other state of the
Union, a Country as well as a State. One reaches
California either over the vast and silent ocean, or
else across two lofty mountain ranges and through a
wilderness, much of which is likely to remain forever
unpeopled, a scorched and arid wilderness, almost
as silent as the sea. One feels that one is entering a
new land. There is a new dry gleam and a new clear
brilliance in the sunlight ; there are new wild flowers and
new trees. Everything is unlike the Mississippi Val-
ley, or the gently undulating plains that rise from it to
the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains. California,
moreover, great as is the diversity of hill and vaUey
within it, is all one country, not cut up by nature into
different regions, but one in its structure and general
character. Guarded on the east by a snowy range,
it has its natural centre at this magnificent bay,
where we are standing, and where noble mountains

229

230 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

look down upon waters blue as those that wash the

shores of Sicily. The bay of San Francisco always

reminds me of

— the sea that parts
Trinacria from the hoarse Calabrian shore.

All this great region between the Sierras and the
Pacific was meant to be the home of one people under
one government.

Nature might, indeed, seem to have intended that
it should be not a part of the United States but a
separate country under a separate independent govern-
ment; and a separate independent country it would
no doubt have been but for two causes. One is to be
found in those peculiar political and social economic
conditions which brought on the war with Mexico and
led to the annexation of all this region by the United
States. The other is the fact that not long before
that war the steam-engine, invented some seventy
years before by James Watt, had begun to be applied
to transportation by water and land. Although some
of the early emigrants crossed the great plains and
threaded their painful way through the canons of the
Rocky Mountains and over the high Sierras in wagons,
it was steamships and railways that made California,
which Spain, and after her the Mexicans, had left unde-
veloped, really a part of the United States and attached
her indissolubly to the great Republic. But for the
two causes I have mentioned, one may well believe
that those who in the fulness of time settled in Call-

WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 231

fornia would, whether they came from Europe or from
the United States, have set up here an independent
government. Closer and closer as your relations
have now become with the Mississippi and Atlan-
tic states, through the extension and improvements
of railway communication, — closer still as they may
perhaps become when the Panama Canal has been
completed, — California still wears in many points the
aspect of a distinct country; and this is one of the
things which makes her so exceptionally interesting to
the traveller, and not less to the historian, who en-
deavors to study not only the history of the past, but
through the past the probable history of the future.

On returning here after twenty-six years I am struck
by the enormous strides with which the material devel-
opment of the State has advanced. Some of its cities
are growing almost as fast as New York and Chicago.
Many parts of the country, which in 1883 were scarcely
inhabited, have now become rich agricultural dis-
tricts. The whole country is moving forward at a
steady pace, which makes the continuance of your
material wealth well assured ; and even when the mines
of precious metals have ceased to be so important a
factor as they were in early days, your agricultural
resources will continue to promise a stable prosperity.
Great advances have been made in irrigation, and
vast tracts have thus been made possible for cultiva-
tion. If you will take thought in time for the saving
of your forests, and will replant the areas where forests

232 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

have existed and which are not needed for agriculture,
you will be able to conserve not only an important
source of wealth in the timber, but also the undi-
minished flow of your streams. With your grain,
your fruit, your cattle, and your sheep, you may
confidently rely on the maintenance of the chief sources
of natural wealth ; and if you desire overflowing riches
and a teeming population, you can, humanly speaking,
be sure of having both in as large a measure as you
wish. The process of development will go on till all has
been got out of nature that nature can render. Then at
last will come a day when all the gold and silver will
have been won from placers and reefs, and aU the soil
capable of tillage will be under crops or laid out in gar-
dens or orchards ; when railways and electric lines will
have been constructed sufficient to meet the needs of
the population, and when that population itself wiU
have grown to figures which I hardly venture to
conjecture.

When all this has happened, what next ? There is a
story of an Eastern monarch who, ui the midst of his
career of conquest, was recounting to one of his most
trusted councillors what he had done, and announc-
ing what further expeditions he proposed to make.
He described country after country' and nation after
nation which it was his purpose to overrun and sub-
jugate, and, as each was mentioned, his councillor
asked him, "And after that, what?" — until at last
he had enumerated so many that little was left of the

WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 233

then known world over which his armies would not
have been triumphant. But the councillor at the end
of the list still repeated, "And then, what next?"
and the conqueror at last could only say, "Well I
suppose we shall then sit down and enjoy ourselves and
live happily for the rest of our lives," — to which the
councillor answered : "If happiness is the goal, why not
begin to be happy now ? You have already got more
than any one has ever conquered before. When your
plans of conquests are completed you will be weary and
old. Let us take our enjoyment now ? "

Some question like this arises in one's mind when
one contemplates the victories over nature which
men are winning here in the United States. You,
indeed, will not be old nor weary when those victories
are completed, for the generations that follow may
well be as forceful as your own. But the time
must arrive when the American people will have prac-
tically finished with the work of conquering, and when,
having got out of nature all that nature can yield, and
applied the resources of science to industry and to
commerce on a scale so large and with such refined
efficiency that there will be little more motive for the
accumulation of wealth, they will have to ask them-
selves what remains to be done, and how best they
can enjoy all that they have accumulated. So let this
question be put : What will happen when California is
filled by twenty or thirty millions of people, and its
valuation is ten times what it is now, and the wealth

234 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

will have grown so great that it will be hard to know
how to spend it ? The day will, after all, have then, as
now, only twenty-four hours. Each man will have
only one mouth, one pair of ears, and one pair of
eyes. There will be more people, as many perhaps as
the country can support, and the real question will be
not about amassing more wealth or having more
inhabitants, but whether the inhabitants will then be
happier or better than they have been hitherto or are
at this moment. Although that time may be still dis-
tant, you may already begin to ask yourselves what
the development of natural resources and the acquisi-
tion of wealth is doing for the lives of the people.
You have advanced so much farther along the path of
material comfort than your grandfathers dreamed of,
that it is not too soon to think of enjo3Tiient ; and,
even if you do not slacken in your pace, you may weU
reflect upon the ultimate aims for which you are
working.

How can the University help you to think out those
aims and to choose the best means for reaching them ?
Few of us reflect upon the ultimate purposes even of our
own individual lives, still fewer on the ideals towards
which national and State life should move.

What you all wish, what you, and all everywhere
who think of others as well as of themselves, set up
as an aim, is to secure for the people as a whole — the
poorer as well as the richer — the conditions and sur-
roundings that make for Happiness. The difiiculty is

WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 235

to determine which are the conditions that will be
helpful and towards which you will work. Let us
think for a moment of these as they affect rural life
and city life in your State.

One is told that in California as well as everywhere
else the tendency is for the dwellers in the country to
flock into the cities. Yet in California the conditions
for an enjoyable rural life are especially favorable.
The scenery is beautiful and the climate genial as
well as invigorating. Except in the high mountains
you have no such grim winter as that of the North
Atlantic states. Nobody who has enjoyed this climate
wishes to go back either to Europe or to eastern
America. In many parts of your State the yield of
the soil is so large that the cultivators dwell near
together, living under good conditions and in populous
communities. Here, therefore, if anywhere, country
life ought to be attractive. Yet even here, one is told,
the dislike for what is deemed the comparative solitude
and isolation of rural life, together with the restless
passion for amusement, produce a steady drain away
from the land into the city. In California two great
cities, San Francisco (including Oakland and Berkeley,
which for this purpose may be deemed parts of it) and
Los Angeles, have two-fifths of the whole population
of the State and are growing more rapidly than the
State grows.

This is unfortunate. It is far better for the health
and physical stamina of a people that the bulk of them

236 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

should live in the country and work there \vith plenty of
fresh air around them. It is better for the national
mind and character that men should be in contact ^nth
nature than that they should live cooped up in streets.
You remember the old line, "God made the country
and man made the Town." It is better for the poHt-
ical stability of a government that the to^vn dwellers
should not outnumber the country dwellers, and that
there should not be many vast aggregations of men
living packed tightly together and more liable to be
moved by sudden excitement than country folk are.

A large number of small farmers, each cultivating
his own land, constitute an element which gives
solidity and strength to a State. Such men are less
eager and volatile and hasty than the dwellers in cities;
they have a permanent interest in good order and the
regular working of public administration. I ^^all not
venture to assert, as some have done, that the prepon-
derance of large cities is necessarily dangerous ; yet it
is undesirable, both politically and because it affects
the physical health and vigor of the nation.

How are you to check this growth of cities at the
expense of the rural areas ? One means is the im-
provement of rural schools, and especially of agricultu-
ral education, so as to teach the cultivator how to
apply science to his calling, and to find pleasure in
applying it. This, I know, your Universit}^ has been
doing, and doing so earnestly as to endear itself more
and more to the people of the State. To make the

WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 237

country children interested in the nature that lies
around them is to furnish them with a source of en-
joyment for the whole of their lives. Another means
is the introduction of cooperative methods among culti-
vators, — methods by which immense progress has been
made in Denmark and other regions far less favoured
than this. The extension of electric railways and of
a cheap telephone service contributes to reduce that
loneliness of which many country dwellers complain,
while those of us who are tired of the crowds and
noise of cities long for rural quiet. My chief con-
cern, however, is to indicate the importance of the
object in view, and to observe that California has some
advantages enabling it to set an example. The irri-
gated districts of your State constitute a region ex-
ceptionally fitted to give country life all the attractions
that should induce men to prefer it to crowded cities.
The farms are small, averaging, I believe, not more
than twenty acres. Families live near enough to one
another to enjoy the pleasures of social life. It is
easier for people to organize for the purposes of agri-
cultural cooperation or for social ends.

When we turn to city life and its conditions we are
met by still larger questions. On the political side of
the matter let this one word only be said: that sound
political conditions in cities are the first and essential
condition of municipal progress. There is a great
deal of work needing to be done in Americans cities
which the municipal government ought to do, because

238 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

no other agency can do it so efficiently and so com-
pletely. Yet in many cities much of this work is
withheld from municipal officers and councils because
officers and councils are not trusted by the people.
Once a city has succeeded in placing honest men and
capable men in control, how much there is which the
government may accomplish for the people, — how
much for their health, for the proper supply of Hght
and water and means of locomotion, for the laying out
of handsome streets and their adornment by pubhc
buildings, for the provision of parks and playgrounds
and museums and libraries and art galleries and
perhaps concert halls also, where the finest kinds of
music may be given to the people and their taste for
such music formed ! A great city ought in all these
matters to be not only the guardian of the material
well-being of her children, but also their guide and
instructress, — elevating their tastes, displaying to
them visible shapes of beauty, helping them to knowl-
edge and enjoyment, making them feel their common
interest in intellectual and moral progress. A finely
ordered city might be, as European cities have before
now been, as Athens was in the ancient world and
Florence was in the Middle Ages, a source of inspira-
tion to those who dwell therein ; and a common pride
in it may be a bond to unite all classes. Some few
cities have already set an example in this direction;
and some rich men, who are enlightened as weU as
rich, have turned their wealth to the best account

WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 239

in providing beneficent sources of enjoyment for their
less favoured fellow-citizens.

You may ask why I speak of these things here to you
in this University. Because it is one of the chief
functions of a great university, a duty and a function
which no other organized body in the State is so well
fitted to discharge, to think about these things and
to impress their value upon the minds of the people.
You are celebrating to-day the anniversary of the
foundation by the State of this central seat of educa-
tion and learning and research, the mission of which is
to represent and embody the organized force and will of
this Calif ornian community in promoting all that makes
for intellectual advancement and moral elevation.
Universities are lamps which cast forth their light on
everything around them. Besides their direct and
primary duty to train and inform the mmds of the
youth of the State, supplying the knowledge and skill
needed for the work of life, it is for them to collect
and focus whatever science and learning can provide
for any form of State service. Not only ought they
to distribute information on scientific phenomena and
processes applicable to agriculture and other industries,
as some State universities have done with eminent
success, they ought also to place their knowledge of
economic history and of the economic conditions of
other countries, and of the experiments, whether made
in those countries by legislative or by voluntary
action, at the disposal of the administrative officials

240 UNIVERSITY AND mSTORICAL ADDRESSES

and the legislature of their State. When any investi-
gation is needed, either of a scientific or historical or
economic kind, they can furnish from among their
teaching stajEE trained investigators whose wdde range
of knowledge and mastery of method will make them
valuable colleagues of the practical men who also
may be charged with the conduct of such enquiries.
In short, the universities of a State — and this appHes
also to your great sister university (the Leland Stan-
ford) at Palo Alto and the other Californian seats of
learning — ■ should act as its organs for all such of its
efforts as need a broader sweep of view and a more
perfect mastery of exact and philosophical methods
than the ablest man, taken from the walks of daily
business or professional life, can be expected to
possess.

One danger that has recently begun to threaten
university life seems not yet to have attacked the State
universities of the West. I learn with pleasure that
you have here kept within reasonable limits that
passion for athletic sports and competitions which has
been pushed to excess in England and Australia, and
which in some American universities goes so far that
the only kind of distinction that students value is
that which attaches to proficiency in these competitions.
Intellectual excellence — so one is told — is in these
"seats of learning" but little regarded. It is the ath-
lete, the runner or baseball or football player, who is
the hero. The competitions and contests of football

WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 241

or baseball teams excite such interest that not only
do many thousands gather to see the match, but a
vast deal of time is spent on reading about the perform-
ances and the prospects of the teams. Thus the
minds of the students are occupied by these trivial
matters to the exclusion of interest in things that are
really fitted to engage and delight intelligent minds.
This is a strange inversion of what might be expected
in a high civilization, and a strange perversion of the
true spirit of university life. It is not an encouraging
symptom. It reminds one of that inordinate passion
for the sports of the amphitheatre, and, especially for
chariot racing, which grew more and more intense with
the decadence of art and literature and national spirit
in the Roman Empire. What does civilization mean,
except that we realize more and more the superiority
of the mind to the body?

The muscular powers should by all means be kept
in perfect efficiency; and the pleasures of strenuous
bodily exercise are legitimate and valuable. Having
delighted in one of them aU my life I am not likely to
disparage them. No one who knows how much the
sound body does for the sound mind will deprecate
the playing of games by students, and that by all
of the students, and not merely by an exceptionally
strong or skilful few. Of such play in hours of recre-
ation there is nothing but good to be said : what
one regrets is the encroachment of this passionate in-
terest in competitions upon the higher interests and

242 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

enjoyments of academic life. After all, the mind is
better worth cultivating than the body. It is by the
mind that civilization advances and peoples are great.
And what is the purpose of a university except to
enable the youth of a nation to cultivate those mental
faculties which they have to exert and develop through
the rest of their lives, when the few years fit for
violent physical effort have passed ?

I have spoken of the teachers and the students :
let me say a word also as to the graduates. The
universities may, through their alunmi, exercise a
powerful influence in forming the pubHc opinion of
their State. In most parts of America the tie between
the university and its graduates is a close one, closer
perhaps than anywhere in Europe. They are inter-
ested in its welfare, and ready to come forward to sup-
port it when it has something to ask from the legis-
lature and ready also to raise funds themselves for
any purpose calculated to extend its usefulness. They
listen with respect to views proceeding from its Presi-
dent and its leading teachers. They form associations
of their own in the principal cities, and through these
often do much to raise the intellectual and ci\'ic tone
of the community. They are usually to the front
in all movements for administrative reform.

One class of graduates in particular has a very
important part to play. I mean the teachers, partic-
ularly those in the high schools. The intellectual
interest, the public spirit, the literary tastes and moral

J

WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 243

tone of each generation as it comes to manhood ver^r
largely depend on the quality of the instruction and
mental stimulus received in the upper schools ; and
this will become all the more true of California as the
influx of settlers from abroad diminishes, and the bulk
of the population is home-born. Now, the quality
of the teachers and their capacity for inspiring fine
ideals in youthful minds, depends upon the spirit which
their university breathes into them, and on the high
conception it gives them of what intellectual energy
and intellectual enjoyment reaUy mean. The uni-
versities are the natural centres and culminating
points of the educational system of a State, and their
influence ought to make itself felt all through that
system.

Lastly, a university, being the visible evidence and
symbol of the homage which the State pays to learn-
ing and science, has the function of reminding the
people by its constant activity how much there is in
life beyond material development and business suc-
cess. Philosophy, history, literature, art, scientific
discovery, the prosecution of all those studies and
enquiries the value of which cannot be measured by
doUars and cents, these things not only provide un-
failing sources of enjoyment, but are ultimately the
foundation of national prosperity and strength. We
are all only too apt to think solely about the Present.
The average man, be he educated or uneducated, is in
our day so busy that he seldom thinks of anything

244 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

else. But the university is a place where those who
are entering on life learn to think also of the Past and
of the Future, — where they are taught to rival the
great men who have gone before and to meditate how
they can carry on what such men began for the bene-
fit of those who will come after. True it is that all
we know of the Future is that it will never be what
the Past was. As the Athenian poet says — this
beautiful Greek theatre of yours brings the lines to my
mind —

AwavO 6 fiaKpo? KavapLdfir)TO<; xpo^^os
(fiTju T a8r)Xa Kal (jiavevTa KpvTTTCTai..^

The law of change is universal. Yet it is mainly
through understanding the past that we can conject-
ure what the future will be, can work for it, and can
secure, so far as we may, that to our State and Nation
it shall come fraught with blessing.

When I think of the future, my mind turns back to
California, and to all that your noble State may be-
come. You have made it a State, but nature made it
a Country. It is still in its first youth, with won-
derful possibilities before it, — a country with an infinite
variety of beautiful mountain, valley, and sea-coast
scenery. One cannot but feel that it is destined,
more perhaps than any other part of the United States,
to develop a new and distinctive type of art, perhaps

^ Long and unreckoned time brings to life all things out of the un-
seen and hides them away again when they have been seen. — From
the Ajax of Sophocles.

WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 245

of landscape painting, perhaps of literature. Your
people have already an individuality. They are
Calif ornians ; they have something all their own, —
an aspect, a manner of speech, a softness — so one is
told — in the voice. May we not hope to see this
individuality blossom forth into products that are
distinctive in thought and in poetry? Your scenery,
your social conditions in their earlier stage, inspired two
of the most striking pieces of literature that America
has given to the world in the last half century. More
will doubtless come when a larger part of your people
find leisure from those restless efforts to develop the
material resources of the land which have hitherto
occupied you. Through the centuries to come, in
which from the peak that stands up behind this spot
generation after generation of students will see the
sun mount from behind the mighty Sierras to the East
and sink into the waves of the Pacific in the West,
may this University, enriched by the liberality and
guided by the judicious care of your legislature,
ever play a worthy part in the building up of a Cali-
fornian character and in the expansion of a Californian
community that shall make the Golden State the home
of a happy and enhghtened people.

ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY

Address Delivered at Lake Mohonk Coneerence on Peace
AND Arbitration, May 21, 1909.

ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY

Address Delivered at Lake Mohonk Coneerence on Peace
AND Arbitration, May 21, 1909.^

About the blessings of peace, about the horrors of
war, about the value of arbitration as a means of pre-
venting war, surely everything that can be said has
been said. You who meet here to promote arbitra-
tion and peace have no enemy in the field, or at least
none within the range of your artillery. There are
still persons who hanker after war, and therefore dis-
like arbitration, but I notice that they are now mostly
reduced to one argument, viz., that war is the mother
of courage, self-sacrifice, and other virtues. No doubt
these virtues may be displayed and have often been
displayed in warfare, as in many another department
of life. So courage and constancy have been displayed
in a still nobler form by martyrs who have died for
their faith. But we do not desire religious persecu-
* tion for the sake of having martyrs. Courage and
loyalty are being daily displayed in many another
way : and opportunities for displaying these and
other virtues would remain if war were to vanish

^ In revising this address for publication some additions have been
made to render the line of argument more clear.

249

250 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

as religious persecution has vanished. We need not,
however, attempt to argue with the people that delight
in war, because they are not here to-night to be con-
vinced. Those who dwell on the benefits of war do
not come to listen to us, their blessings give us no
chance of convincing them. The Hawks take no
interest in this congress of doves. Accordingly,
whoever addresses such a gathering as this finds
himself in the position of preaching to the converted.
It is an easy process ; but it is not stimulating to the
speaker and is apt to prove dull to the converted,
being also wholly unprofitable to the unconverted
who keep out of the range of fire. If the latter
were here, we should make one admission. There
have been some justifiable wars. Where a so-called
government plunders and massacres its subjects, in-
surrection against it may be a duty, and it may be
right for other nations to put an end by arms to op-
pressions that are as bad as war itseK. Such cases
have happened in Europe and may happen again.
But what other wars in our time can be deemed to
have been necessary ?

Our discussions at all these peace conferences are
really discussions in the abstract, and we shall not
know whether the cause is making real progress until
the time comes for translating abstract resolutions
into concrete practice. No doubt some progress has
been made. The work accompHshed at the Hague
has been valuable. The creation of the Hague Court

ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 251

and the reference to it of such controversies as that
which the United States had recently with Mexico
and that between the United States and Great Brit-
ain relating to the Newfoundland Fisheries mark a
real advance.

Nevertheless, it is felt that the risks of war have not
disappeared, and the strongest proof of this appears in
the fact that all the great countries continue to go on
increasing their military and naval armaments. You
have heard a good deal already here about armaments.
Let me add a few plain words about them, words
suggested by what I have seen of the relations of the
European States for the last fifty years. There are
three causes which have induced or may induce nations
to maintain large armies and powerful fleets. One is
the desire to aggress on another nation. As to this,
be weU assured that none of the six. great European
Powers has at present any desire or purpose to attack
any of the other five. Apart from any higher motives,
each has its internal troubles, each knows the tremen-
dous risks any attack would involve. Such wars of
conquest as belonged to the days of Frederick the
Great of Prussia and to those of Napoleon Bonaparte
are out of date. A second motive is the wish to have
that weight in the councils of nations which the posses-
sion of military and naval force undoubtedly gives in
such a world as the present. It is not necessarily a
motive making for war ; all depends on the spirit and
intentions of the nation, or its rulers, who desire to

252 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

assert their influence. A third is the feeHng that a
State must be prepared to resist aggression, or that
extreme form of aggression, invasion, by having the
strength needed to defend its frontiers.

As you all know, it is these two latter motives that
have led the six great European Powers to maintain
some of them large fleets and all but one of them large
armies. Each is apprehensive of the possible designs
of the other. Most of them would like to reduce their
armaments, but none of them likes to be the first to
do so. In such circumstances suggestions looking
towards reduction would come best from a great
nation which is not threatened with aggression or
invasion from any quarter. There is only one such
nation. It is the United States. You here have
no enemy in the world, that is to say, there is no
other great Power which has any ground for enmity
to you, and there is most assuredly none which has
anything to gain by attacking you. If you remark
that Great Britain maintains a large navy, let me
ask you to remember that she is obliged to maintain
such a navy because, having an army smaU in com-
parison with the armies of other European States and
being within sight of the European Continent, she feels
that fleets sufficient to guard her coast are an absolute
necessity, a costly necessity indeed, but one to which
she must bow. How different is your case ! Against
whose attacks is it that you stand on guard ? No one
dreams of invading the United States. You are three

ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 253

thousand miles from Europe and six thousand miles
from Asia, and the offensive power of a hostile fleet
diminishes rapidly with every thousand miles from its
base. Your internal resources, your wealth, your pop-
ulation, the intelligence and energy of your people,
added to the advantages of your position, would make
you strong for defensive war even if your fleet was
much less than its present size. If you ever again
engage in war, it ^is likely to be a war of "your own
seeking, for nobody will aggress upon you. Is it not,
therefore, now, I will not say a duty, but an oppor-
tunity specially offered to you, to render a service to
the world by taking the initiative toward the reduction
of those armies and navies which consume so large a
part of the revenues of nations and increase the ap-
prehensions with which they watch one another ? As
you yourselves would say, in one of those concisely
expressive phrases which you teach your visitors to
use, is it not "up to you" to do this?

The existence of immense land and sea forces, kept
upon what is practically a war footing, increases the
risk of strife, for it diminishes the period that would
otherwise elapse before fighting could begin. It keeps
the minds of nations, and especially of the two
great fighting professions in each nation, fixed upon
possibilities of war, and brings those possibilities
nearer.

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds
Makes ill deeds done.

254 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

There is no certainty that if some dispute suddenly
arose inflaming the passions of two nations they would
refer it to arbitration. The recent arbitration treaties
which your government has concluded with other
nations expressly — and, I venture to think, unfortu-
nately — exclude from their scope certain kinds of dis-
pute, those which affect " honour and vital interests."
The making of this exception shows that governments
have not that full confidence in the application of
the principle which many of you may desire. Even
where the case is one that does fall within the
terms of an arbitration treaty, we cannot be sure
that two nations, each perhaps irritated "and excited,
may not prefer to resort to arms rather than use
the machinery for securing peace which they have
themselves in their more tranquil moments provided.
All the virtuous sentiments, all the good resolu-
tions, may be forgotten when anger and suspicion
suspend the reign of reason. There is no present sign
that this will happen in our time, nor does there now
exist any ground of difference between any two nations
which could justify hostilities. All the nations both
of this hemisphere and of the other have every pos-
sible reason for endeavoring to keep the peace. In-
terest — to say nothing of conscience and duty — pre-
scribes that course. Nevertheless, when we remember
how often in the past governments and nations that
had every interest to keep the peace allowed themselves
to be drawn into war, and how disproportionate the

ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 255

alleged causes of strife were to the real interests in-
volved, we cannot be sure that the same thing may
not occur again, and we must ask once more, Why is it
that good resolutions are so often forgotten ? Why is
the practice of nations so much worse than the theory
which not only you here, but the leading statesmen in
nearly every nation, profess to hold ?

One of the answers most often given is that the iU-
feeling between nations which leads them up to war
is due to the press. When a dispute arises between
two peoples, the newspapers — so it is charged —
begin in each country to misrepresent the purposes
and the sentiments of the other people, to suppress
the case for the other country, and to overstate the
case for their own, they twist or embellish facts, and
go on so appealing to national vanity and inflaming
national passion, that at last they lead each people to
beUeve itself wholly in the right and the other wholly
in the wrong. To what extent these charges are
justified, your recollections of how the press, European
and American, has behaved before the outbreak of
the various wars in which great nations have been
involved in and since 1870 will enable you to judge.
As respects the American newspapers, my experience
of the last few years is that a large majority of them
are in favour of peace and arbitration and not at
all unfriendly to foreign countries. That has emphat-
ically been so as regards their attitude towards my own
country.

256 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

However, I am not here either to censure or to
defend the newspapers. They can take care of
themselves. But in the interests of truth and justice
it must be asked whether it is really the press that is
chiefly to blame. Public writers do not write to please
themselves, but to please and interest their readers.
If foreign countries are attacked, it is because they
think the public expect and relish such attacks. Men
are apparently so constituted as to listen more readily
to blame than to praise bestowed on their fellow-men,
and there is in many minds a notion that it is patriotic
to disparage other nations, and that the display of their
faults enhances our own virtues. Thus in each country
the newspapers try to meet and gratify what they take
to be the wishes of the people, playing down to their
faults rather than playing up to their virtues.

Every country has the newspapers it deserves for
the papers are what the people make them, and
reflect back the sentiments they believe the people to
hold. So if the people wish that the organs of opinion
should show a truly pacific spirit, friendly to other
nations, anxious to know whenever an international
dispute arises, what the case of the other nation is,
they will intimate their wish by ceasing to buy, or
by withdrawing their advertising from, the news-
papers which try to provoke strife. Thereupon most
of the newspapers will, in their desire to please their
public, change their own attitude, -v^dll abstain from
reckless or inflammatory language, and will supply to

ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 257

their readers such facts and opinions as will not kindle
passion and will at any rate not tend to hinder peace.

Thus we come back, as in democratic countries we
always do come back, to the People ; that is, to
ourselves, the ordinary citizens who are the ultimate
masters both of the government and of the press.
Why do we, the ordinary citizens, practically en-
courage the newspapers to do the very things which
you, the friends of peace, blame the newspapers for
doing ? Why do we like to have other nations placed
in the worst light and their defects exaggerated?
Why is it thought patriotic to decry and assail
other nations, and unpatriotic to indicate any faults
in our own conduct, any weak points in our own
case ? Why does each people behave as if it alone
were virtuous and deserved the special favor of Provi-
dence, even as in past centuries each nation used to
celebrate a Te Deum for a victory its army had won,
as if the Almighty were its peculiar friend ? It knows
that every other people also thinks highly of itself and
meanly of others, and that each has about as much
ground and no more for so thinking. Yet it continues
to glorify itself, and enjoys hearing the other nation de-
nounced and vilified, just as the Iroquois and Algon-
quins who once roved these woods in the midst of
which we are here meeting, used to hurl opprobrious
epithets at one another before they rushed forward
with the tomahawk.

At this moment all the governments in all the great

258 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

military and naval States are (I venture to believe)
honestly desirous of peace. Not one of them has any
cause for war. Not one of them but would lose by
war far more than it could gain. It is a fatal error,
an error which has come down from the days when
barbarous tribes raided for plunder, and which ought
to be now obsolete, to believe that nations gain some-
thing by a successful war. Even when they levy an
indemnity upon a vanquished enemy, the conquerors
themselves lose in commerce and industry, and often
also in the weakened sense of security, far more than
the indemnity is worth. Civilized governments now
know this and wish to avoid war. Yet it is appar-
ently possible for those who desire, from whatever
motives, to stir up suspicion and enmity to succeed in
convincing each nation that the other has designs
upon it. Quite recently this was tried upon your-
selves. Much suspicion, much alarm was aroused,
without the slightest justification, between you and
another Power, though both your government and its
government were perfectly friendly, each desiring to
behave well by the other. Any man of sense could
see that Japan had no possible interest in provoking
a conflict with the United States. Her greatest
interest was peace, a peace which would leave
her free to deal with the numerous grave problems
that confront her, in Korea, in Formosa, and else-
where, as well as to press forward her mternal de-
velopment. She knew that, and we all knew that she

ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 259

knew it. Yet this insensate attempt to represent Japan
as ready to spring upon the United States went on.
Why will not people do a little thinking before they
embark in such a campaign of exasperation ?

Every nation is conscious of its own rectitude of
purpose ; each declares, and says that it believes,
that its armaments are maintained for its own safety
and wiU not be used unjustly or aggressively. But
each one is told that it must not credit with similar
good intentions the other nation which is for the mo-
ment the object of its jealousy. The ordinary man is
apparently more prone to believe evil than good ; and
hardly anybody takes up the cause of the other nation
and tries to make its case understood. That would
be called unpatriotic.

Is not the fault then not so much in the press which
ministers to Our foibles, as in ourselves, that we are too
ignorant, perhaps wilfully ignorant, about other na-
tions, that we do not try to understand them and to
imagine what we should feel in their place ? Is not this
one chief cause of the atmosphere of suspicion which
pervades the relations of the Great Powers, and leads
them to go on creating the enormous armaments and
levying the enormous taxes under which their people
stagger ? Would not a better knowledge by each na-
tion of the other nations do something to dispel these
suspicions ? Every nation must of course be prepared
to repel any dangers at all likely to threaten it. But
it should also try to ascertain whether the dangers

26o UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

it is told to provide against are real or illusory, and it
should try to enter into and realize the position of
other nations and ask whether its own conduct may
not be exciting in their minds a mistaken impression
of its purposes. Suspicion breeds suspicion ; and na-
tions have sometimes come to fear and dislike one
another only because each was incessantly told that it
was disliked by the other, and that the other was plan-
ning to attack it.

Thirty or forty years ago there was a good deal of
this suspicion between Britain and the United States.
Better knowledge by each nation of the other has
extinguished that feeling and substituted for it a gen-
uine friendship which will, we may feel sure, at once
recur to arbitration for the settlement of any question
between them that may arise. Why should this not
be done as regards other Powers also ? Why when a
controversy arises with any other country should we
not, before sharpening our tempers and our swords, try
to recognize that there are two sides to the controversy
and keep cool till we have considered the other side
and made the other nation feel that we wish and mean
to be reasonable ?

Our country is not the only thing to which we owe
our allegiance. It is owed also to justice and to
humanity, owed to our fellow-men in other countries
as well as in our own. Doubtless we are called
lipon to think first and feel first for those whom we
know best and for whom we are most directly respon-

ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 261

sible, our own fellow-citizens. But we are not therefore
to forget that we have duties to the other peoples also,
and those duties are doubly urgent if in any case we
think that justice is as much on their side as on ours.
True patriotism consists not in waving a flag, not in
shouting " our country, right or wrong," but in so
valuing our country and respecting its best traditions
as to desire and to strive that our country shall be
righteous as well as strong. A State is none the less
strong for being resolved to use its strength in a tem-
perate and pacific spirit and for putting justice and
honour above all its other interests. Ought not the
patriot to say to his country what the poet said to his
lady :

" I could not love thee, Dear, so much
Loved I not honour more."

It was well observed not long ago by Mr. Root that
there ought to be, and there was gradually coming to
be, a public opinion of nations which favored arbitration
and would condemn any government which plunged
into war when amicable means of settlement were
available. May we not go even farther and desire
and work for the creation of a public opinion of the
world which has regard to the general interests of the
world, raising its view above the special interests of
each people ? Sixty years ago the progress of human-
ity was held to be marked and measured by the
growth of a cosmopolitan spirit which extended its
benevolence and sympathy over the earth. The

262 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

strengthening of the sentiment of nationahty was then
welcomed as a means of helping oppressed or divided
nationalities to assert themselves and secure miion.
No one then supposed that national feeling would
reach its present height. It is surely carried to excess
when men think only of the glory and the power of their
State and forget what they owe to mankind at large.

A very distinguished man, one of the keenest observers
in this coimtry, observed to me lately that he found
there was to-day less of a kindly feeling towards mem-
bers of the non-European races who settle here, such
as Japanese, Chinese, and Hindoos, less indignation
when they are ill treated, less anxiety to secure fair
and just treatment for them, than used to be extended
to those races forty years ago. My own observations
have shown me that there has been during recent years
in Europe less sympathy with those who are struggling
against the tyranny or cruelty of their rulers in other
countries than was extended fifty years ago to the
patriots who then fought and suffered for freedom in
Italy, Poland, and Hungary.

Have we then gone back in this generation? Has
the sentiment of race antagonism grown stronger and
the love of liberty where others are concerned grown
weaker with the growth of nationalism in each country
and with the absorption of our thoughts by the social
problems which we are trying to solve at home ? If
so, it is time that we reverted to the broader and
more kindly attitude of the generation of Lincoln and

ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 263

Mazzini and Gladstone, when the best minds did not
limit their good-will by colour, or by creed, or by
country, but sought to labour for the world as well as
for themselves.

All over the earth the fortunes of each people are to-
day more involved with those of other peoples than was
ever the case before. As the possibilities of strife are
increased by closer contact, so also the opportunities
for mutually helpful intercourse are also increased, and
the welfare of each is more clearly than ever before
the welfare of all. I do not mean to undervalue any
machinery that can be provided for settling disputes
and furthering the desire we all feel to attain our
common aim in a practical way. But something more
is needed. We need a spirit which wUl not merely
hate war because the realities of war are hideous and
hellish or because war means waste and destruction,
but wUl love and seek peace because it desires the
welfare of other peoples and finds the same sort of
happiness in seeing them happy which each of us en-
joys in the happiness of his own friends. Is it not
the mark of a truly philosophic as well as of a truly
pious mind to extend its sympathy and its hopes to all
mankind ? Would not the diffusion of such a feeling
and an appreciation of the truth that every nation
gains by the prosperity and happiness of other peoples
be a force working for peace and good-will among the
nations more powerfully and more steadily than the
best arbitration treaties statesmanship can frame?

THE TERCENTENARY OF THE DISCOVERY
OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN

Address Delivered at Burlington, Vermont, July 8, 1909.

THE TERCENTENARY OF THE DISCOVERY
OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN

Address Delivered at Burlington, Vermont, July 8, 1909.

Mr. President, Governors of Vermont and New
York and Gentlemen : —
You are met to-day to commemorate in Vermont a
great event, which it is fitting that you should com-
memorate — the discovery three centuries ago of that
noble lake which forms the western boundary of your
State, and is one of its greatest charms. When we
think of what this region was three hundred years
ago, one can hardly believe that such great changes
can have passed in so short a time. Short it is, if one
compares three centuries with the long ages that it
took to effect similar changes in the countries of the
Old World. In 1609 the spot on which we are standing
in the centre of a flourishing city was in the midst of
a solemn and awe-inspiring wilderness. What daring
it must have needed to explore those vast and soli-
tary forests, — solitary because the Indian tribes, al-
ways at war with one another, had desolated them
by continual strife, leaving hardly a man alive through
enormous tracts; and how venturesome a spirit that
have been of the men who traversing in frail canoes

267

268 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

long stretches of rivers and lakes, shooting dangerous
rapids, following difficult trails through dense woods
with no guide except the savages, on whom they
could not always rely, woods filled mth wild beasts
and with tribes more dangerous than any beasts; —
what hearts of steel the men must have had who,
far away from all hope of succour, made those dis-
coveries the fruits of which you now enjoy!

When Champlain's Indian guides first paddled his
canoe over the shining waters of your lake, there was
no European settlement nearer this spot than the
little English colony planted two years before on the
James River in Virginia, and you may be sure that
Champlain did not wish that the English were any
nearer, for the settlers whom he had left on Mount
Desert Island fared ill at the hands of English enemies.
It was in this same year 1609 that Henry Hudson first
steered his Dutch ship up the waters of that Hudson
River with which your lake is now connected by a
canal. And if Hudson had travelled north through the
woods from Albany and Champlain had travelled south
through the woods from the southern end of this lake,
they might have met. Let us hope they would have
met in friendship, whatever were the jealousies of
their respective nations, because each was worthy of
the respect of the other, for in both there dwelt a
valiant and unconquerable spirit.

The men who discovered and explored the con-
tinents of North and South America make a wonderful

DISCOVERY OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN 269

line of heroes. If you begin with Christopher Colum-
bus and go on to a man who was in some ways quite
as great, certainly as great both in nautical skill and
in courage, as Christopher Columbus himself , — the
Portuguese Magellan, — and if you include in that line
John and Sebastian Cabot, Vasco Nunez de Balboa,
the discoverer of the Pacific, and De Soto, who first
reached the Mississippi, and Cortes and Pizarro and
Pedro de Valdivia, and such great Frenchmen as
Cartier and La Salle and Pere Marquette and Cham-
plam himself, you have a line of daring and gallant
men to whom the history of the world forms no parallel.
And among all those Samuel de Champlain, a native
of the seafaring land of La Rochelle, first of the great
Frenchmen who explored in the north, was not only
one of the ablest but also one of the most upright.
He was equally skilful and resourceful on sea and
on shore. He knew not only how to discover, but also
how to govern, as his management of his colony of
Quebec showed. He was able to describe with wonder-
ful accuracy the places which he visited. The French
Ambassador has told you how well he narrated the
events of his voyage here, and described the features
of this lake ; and the people of Mount Desert Island
will tell you that the accounts he has left of their shores
are so accurate that you may still navigate the sea along
that coast by the description he gave of the bays and
promontories with their fringmg isles. He was ready
to fight when the time came for fighting, but he had

270 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

no wish to shed blood. He insph-ed confidence in
his followers, for he was not only brave but also gentle
and considerate — much more considerate of his follow-
ers than was the not less daring La Salle. And he
thought first of France and of the faith which he came
to propagate, and last of himself. Samuel de Champlain
was, take him all round, what we call a fine fellow.
He was a man of whom his country does well to be
proud, and you do well to be glad that your lake
should bear his name. I Hke to picture him with his
Indians paddling up the long stretches of the river
and coming out upon a summer evening upon the glit-
tering waters of your lake, seeing it stretch farther to
the south than the eye could reach, and above, on each
side of these deep waters, the long ranges of steep blue
mountains, in which is framed, like some exquisite pic-
ture, the beauty of this inland sea. We are told that
the name of your lake in Indian is " Caniaderi-guar-
unte." Now " Caniaderi-guarunte " is said to mean,
in the Indian language, "the gate of the country"; i.e.
the opening by which men can pass northward and south-
ward through this rugged region. Everywhere else, to
East and to West, the drainage basin of the St. Lawrence
is divided from the basins of the Hudson and the Con-
necticut rivers by lofty mountains and forests which
were in the days of the discoverers all but impassable.
It is a natural highway for commerce ; and what hopes
for dominion and for trade must have thrilled the
heart of Champlain when he saw this splendid sheet

DISCOVERY OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN 271

of water stretching away to some unknown extremity
between the lines of the mountains.

It was an age when the growth of the great Spanish
Empire in the southern parts of North America and
over most of South America had fired the imagination
of other nations to emulate what Spain had done, so
Holland and France and England all sought to create
for themselves dominions similar to that which Spain
had acquired so easily. So the example of Champlain,
who came to found an empire here for the King of
France, fired many another bold French pioneer after
him, until Du Luth reached the farthest corner of
Lake Superior at the spot where a great city now bears
his name, and until La Salle, passing up Lake Michi-
gan, and by the spot where now Chicago stands,
crossed over to the Illinois River, and then descended,
right down to its mouth, the mighty stream of the
Mississippi.

Of all that has happened since those days of Samuel
de Champlain, I have no time to speak. I cannot tell
you of the long process by which Vermont was built
up and filled with the stalwart race of the Green
Mountain boys. Those sturdy men of your moun-
tain land were in the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury what the Western backwoodsmen were eighty
years later, the active and hardy men who had the
qualities which, in your later days, you associate with
the pioneers of the Far West. But in one respect they
were perhaps better company than the men of the Far

272 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

West, for they were not so free and easy in their use
of shooting-irons. Perhaps, however, that is so only
because in those days the revolver had not yet been
invented. Neither must I attempt to describe the pro-
tracted strife that raged along the shores of your lake
between the Vermonters and the men of New York, a
strife so bitter that it is said to have driven Ethan
AUen, your local hero, to contemplate returning to the
allegiance of King George. Those contests gave an
occasion for the display of that admirable quality in
which the citizens of the United States, and particu-
larly of the northern part of the United States, stand
preeminent, a strong sense of justice and indi\'idual
right, and a pertinacious determination to assert
individual right by every method and device known to
the law. These long differences have now been happily
settled, so we see the Governors of Vermont and
New York meeting here in an amity not likely to be
again disturbed. You have no interstate controversy
now, and the only question that might have grown into
an international controversy, one regarding fishing
rights in the lake, has just been peacefully disposed of
by a treaty which Mr. Root (who was with us yester-
day) and I signed last year establishing a joint
American and Canadian Commission, with power to
adjust all fishery matters arising in boundary waters.

How different have been the fortunes of this lake
and its shores from what its discoverers or your fore-
fathers expected or foretold. How wonderfully does

DISCOVERY OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN 273

Fortune make sport of the purposes of man; how
little can the explorer himself tell to what uses settlers
will put the lands to which he has cleared the path.
Champlain, besides seeking, like Henry Hudson, for
a Northwest passage to the Pacific Ocean, came to
establish the dominion of the royal House of France,
to spread the Gospel, to open up a profitable trade
in furs, and to make the river St. Lawrence and this
lake great highways of commerce. The monarchy of
France is gone, the Indians whom he sought to convert
are gone, the furs are gone ; and except for a short
time when the trade in furs was active along Lake
Champlain, the lake has never yet been a thorough-
fare of trade. It promised to become one when, im-
mediately after the first steamboat of Fulton was
launched upon the Hudson, a second steamboat was
launched to ply here. But soon after came the rail-
road, and by the time that the lands to the north and
south had been so filled up that there were plenty of
passengers and freight to carry to and fro, the swifter
transportation by rail had superseded water carriage,
and it is now the railroads and not the steamers that
bear the crowd of passengers to and fro between New
York and Montreal. However, if the hopes entertained
by some enterprising Vermonters are realized and the
now projected deep water line of navigation is opened
up, it may be that the dream of Champlain will at
last be realized and that your lake will at last become
that highway of commerce he desired.

274 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

But now it has become at last a dwelling of peace
and quiet. No more warships are seen upon your
waters, no more forts stand armed upon your shores,
no shouts from war canoes awaken the echoes of your
cliffs. We have been celebrating for the last two days
on the other side of the lake, first at Ticonderoga
where Frenchmen and Englishmen fought on land, and
then at Plattsburg where Colonial Americans and Eng-
lishmen fought on water, and you are to-day celebrat-
ing here in Vermont, a veritable festival of peace, to
which my dear friend and colleague, the representative
of France, has come to mingle his thoughts of peace with
ours, and in which the soldiers of Canada have come to
parade beside your soldiers, to be reviewed by your
genial President, and to be welcomed, as they were
yesterday, with an enthusiasm which thrilled every
British and Canadian heart. One wonders what the
future has in store for a lake whose history has been
so strangely unlike what was predicted for it.

When one remembers the failures of prophets in
the past, one ought to be shy of making any prophecies
for the future ; yet a man may be tempted to prophesy
when he knows that the truth or falsity of his predic-
tion cannot be known until long after he and those
who hear him have all disappeared from tliis scene.
So I will venture to make one prophecy. It does not
seem likely that your shores either on this side or in
New York State on the other side of the lake v^dll
ever be the scene of any startling or sudden develop-

DISCOVERY OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN 275

ment of material wealth. You have indeed some
fertile lands in southern Vermont, and some mines and
marble quarries, but you have not here the coal that
many other parts of the country possess, and your soil
is not as fertile as are the regions along the Mississippi
and its great tributaries. It is indeed possible that
mineral wealth as yet unrevealed may lie hidden deep
in the recesses of your mountains. Science so startles
us nowadays with strange discoveries that we can
never tell what store of minerals — possibly, though
so far as we know, not probably, of radium, far
more costly than gold — may be discovered in the
bosom of some kind of rock not hitherto known to
contain it. But, as far as we can look into -the future
at present, it would seem that the great assets of
these hills and valleys of Vermont are neither minerals
nor fertility of soil. But there are two other assets.

One is the race of men and women that inhabit it.

You men of northern Vermont and northern New
Hampshire and Maine, living among the Appalachian
rocks and mountains in a region which may be called
the Switzerland of America — you are the people who
have had hearts full of the love of freedom which burns
with the brightest flame among mountain peoples,
and who have the restless energy and indomitable
spirit which we always associate with such lake and
mountain lands as those of Switzerland and Scotland.
This bold spirit and force of character have been evident
in the large number of distinguished men that you

276 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

have given to the United States, and in the hardy
pioneers and settlers which you have sent forth from
northern New England to reclaim from the wilderness
and colonize and develop western New York and Ohio
and the rich prairies of the farther West.

The other asset is the beauty and variety of the
scenery with which Providence has blessed you. No
other part of eastern America can compare for the
varied charms of a wild and romantic nature with the
regions that lie around Lake Champlain and the White
Mountains, And as wealth increases in other parts
of the country, as the gigantic cities of the Eastern
States grow still vaster, as population thickens in the
agricultural and manufacturing parts of Ohio and Penn-
sylvania, of Indiana and Illinois, one may foresee a
time when the love of nature and the desire for health-
giving recreation will draw more and more of the popu-
lation of those cities and states, which wiU then be
overcrowded, to seek the delights of nature in these
spots where nature shows at her loveliest. It would
need the imagination of a poet, or rather perhaps the
glowing pen of a real estate agent, to figure out to what
heights the value of landed property, and especially
of villa sites on these shores, will have risen half a
century hence. But this can be confidently said : The
people of all eastern and north-central America will
come more and more to resort to this region of moun-
tains and lakes as the place in which relief mil have
to be sought from the constantly growing strain and

DISCOVERY OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN 277

stress of our modern life. And one who values nature
and loves nature, and who foresees such a future for
this part of North America, cannot refrain from taking
this and every opportunity of begging you to do all you
can to safeguard and preserve those beauties and
charms of nature which have here been lavished upon
you in such abundant measure. Do not suffer any of
these charms to be lost by any want of foresight on
your part now. Save your woods, not only because
they are one of your great natural resources that
ought to be conserved, but also because they are a
source of beauty which can never be recovered if they
are lost. Do not permit any unsightly buildings to
deform a beautiful bit of scenery which can be a joy
to those who visit you. Just as cultivated fields and
meadows add to the variety of a landscape by giving
it a sense of human presence and useful labour, so also
does the modest farmhouse, and the village church,
and even the mansion looking out of its woods, if it be
tasteful in form and colour. But the big, square brick
factory and the tall chimney pouring forth a black
smoke cloud are enough to destroy the charm of the
sweetest landscape. In many another spot where they
can be set up they will do no harm, but these exquisite
shores are no place for them. So, too, preserve the
purity of your streams and your lakes, not merely for
the sake of the angler, but also for the sake of those
who live on the banks, and of those who come to seek
the freshness and delight of an unspoiled nature by

278 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

the river sides. Keep open the long grassy ridges
that lead up to the rocky summits of those picturesque
ranges which stretch themselves out before us. Let no
man debar you from free access to the tops of your
mountains and from the pleasure of wandering along
their sides and enjo3dng the wide prospects they afford.
I am sorry to say that in my own country there are
persons who, in the interests of what they call their
sporting rights, have endeavoured, and too often with
success, to prevent the pedestrian, and the artist, and
the geologist, and the botanist, and anyone who loves
nature and seeks her in her remote and least accessible
recesses, from climbing the mountains and enjo>ing the
views they afford. We, who on our side of the Atlantic
deplore the exclusion of the people from the hills of
Scotland, warn you here not to suffer any such en-
croachments to be made on the natural right of every
people to enjoy the scenery of their country. Men
may for the sake of the whole community be debarred
from trespassing on land dedicated to agriculture,
but the bare hillsides and moorlands which cannot be
used for tillage ought to remain free and open,
available for the pleasure of everyone who seeks
health and recreation there. I am glad to hear that
you have in Vermont a club of mountain climbers who
are making foot trails along the glens and ridges, and
placing shelters below the highest peaks where the
climber may find night quarters on his ascent through
uplands far from any house. Such a club will doubt-

DISCOVERY OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN 279

less help to watch over public rights. See to it,
therefore, that you keep open for the enjoyment of all
the people, for the humblest of the people, as well as
for those who can hire villas and sail about in yachts of
their own, the scenic beauties with which Providence
has blessed you.

Some means you will surely find by which this
noble lake, the most various in its beauty of all the many
lakes of this Appalachian region, can be preserved for
the enjoyment of your whole American people with
some of that wild simplicity and romantic charm which
it possessed when the canoe of Champlain the Dis-
coverer first clove its silent waters.

It was then a deep solitude girt in by primeval
forest. To-day its shores are studded by thriving
towns and villages and "the rich works of men," as
Homer calls them, give it a cheerful air. Beautiful it
always was and is, for the long ridges of the Green
Mountains look across to the bold Adirondack peaks,
and between them the wide expanse smiles under the
sun in myriad wavelets.

On one of the rocky headlands of Mount Desert
Island a tablet of iron let into a mass of granite
records the name of the man who first touched its
coast. Here no monument is needed. The lake itself
and its engirdling mountains are the best memorial
to the heroic explorer, one of the first and greatest of
those who won for France the glory of discovery, and
whose own fame has now gone out over all the western
world, Samuel de Champlain.

I

SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING

Address to the State University of Iowa, April, 1910,

SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING

Address to the State University of Iowa, April, iqio.

Eighty years ago Thomas Carlyle preached the gospel
of Silence and denounced the growing tendency to talk
in public. Since then the habit has increased, is increas-
ing, and seems most unlikely to decrease. It may be
true that everything worth saying has been said.
Nevertheless, orations will go on as long as men are
willing to listen.

You whom I see here present will join — some of you
have already joined — the great army of orators, so it is
natural that you should desire to have a few hints
given you on the subject, even if they claim no other
authority than that which fifty years of observation
here and in Europe may seem to confer. They shall
be put in the form of a few short maxims of a severely
practical character. Most, perhaps aU, of these
maxims will appear obvious, but I give them not be-
cause they are novel, but because they are so con-
stantly neglected as to be worth repeating.

I. Always have something to say. The man who
has something to say and who is known never to speak
unless he has, is sure to be listened to, especially in a
deliberative assembly or wherever there is business to

283

284 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

be done, while the man of mere words carries no sort of
weight. Try to have an idea, or if you cannot find
one — ideas are none too common — have two or three
relevant facts. You may tell me that sometimes a man
is forced to speak when there is nothing to be said. This
does not often happen, because if you think a httle be-
fore you rise, you will almost always find something bear-
ing on the matter in hand, even if the occasion be a
purely ornamental one. There is a well-known speech of
Cicero's in which he had to present a legal case on behalf
of a poet. He evidently knew that the legal case was
weak, so he passed quickly and lightly over it, but made a
graceful and eloquent discourse upon poetry in general.
The theme was not very novel then, and is still less novel
now, but the discourse was so finished in its language
that it can still be read with pleasure. So when you
have to propose the health of some one of whose personal
merits you know nothing, you may say something
about the importance of his office if he is a state
governor or a mayor, or the services rendered by his
profession if he is a surgeon, or if he is a newspaper
reporter, Milton's Areopagitica with its stately argument
on behalf of the liberty of unlicensed printing may sug-
gest something appropriate. If you can find nothing
at ail to say, don't say it. Your silence will not harm
you in the long run.

Lord Brougham, who was a power in his day, though
his eloquence does not suit our modern taste, ad\dsed
young speakers to begin by acquiring fluency as the

1
I

SOME fflNTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 285

one indispensable thing, and William Pitt the younger
is said to have acquired his marvellous command of
words by having been trained by his father to trans-
late rapidly at sight from Latin authors. Nevertheless
there is such a thing as a fatal fluency. Whoever follows
Brougham's advice ought to beware the habit of think-
ing more of the words than of the sense.

2. Always know what you mean to say. If possible,
consider beforehand what you are going to say, and
make your own mind perfectly clear what is the argu-
ment which you want to put, or the facts you want to
convey. If your own mind is muddled, much more mud-
dled wiU your hearers be. Bring your thoughts to a
point, reject whatever is irrelevant, and be content if
you have one good point and can drive it home. It is
pitiable to see how often a man who really has some
knowledge of his subject goes groping or stumbling
about, trying to get somewhere, but not getting any-
where, not for want of words, but because he cannot
put his ideas into the form of definite propositions.
In trying to discover what it is that you mean,
you may discover that you mean nothing. If so,
the sooner you know it the better. Sometimes one
hears a speech in the course of which the speaker gets
his own mind clear, and comes at last to know what
he means, but when it is too late to get hold of the
audience. If he had thought the thing out beforehand,
all would have gone well.

3. Always arrange your remarks in some sort of order.

286 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

No matter how short they are to be, they ^dll be the
better for having a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Nothing pleases an audience more than the sense
that they are being led along a path towards a definite
goal by a man who knows his way. It gives them
confidence that the speaker understands what he is
about and will bring them out all right somewhere.
Do not, however, let your arrangement be so obtru-
sively elaborate as to alarm them. It used to be the
fashion of Scottish preachers to divide their subject into
three or four "heads" with a "firstly," a "secondly,"
a "thirdly," and so forth, under each head, so that
the listener knew what a long road he had to travel. I
remember one sermon in which a venerable minister
got as far as nineteenthly under the second head. The
process of classifying facts and arguments and placing
them in their right order in one's own mind helps
to clarify it, while it adds strength to the argument.
It might almost be said that a well-arranged speech is
seldom a bad speech, because in the process of arrange-
ment a man of any sense is sure to find out the
deficiencies in his facts or the weak points in his
arguments in time to cure them.

4. At all hazards, Be Clear. Make your meaning,
whatever it is, plain to your audience. Though
obscure speech is usually due to obscure thought, this is
not always so. Some persons who think clearly have not
learned to express themselves clearly, because they are
nervous in public, or have an insufficient command of 1

1

SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 287

words. In such cases it may be better to resort to
the expedient, otherwise to be deprecated, of reading a
speech from manuscript rather than confuse the audience.
You have, moreover, to think not of the form thoughts
take in your own mind, but of the form in which they
will be comprehensible by your audience. Do not imi-
tate the bishop who, preaching in a village church,
told Hampshire rustics that "Nature herself shall be
the palimpsest on which Omnipotence shall inscribe the
characters of a rejuvenated humanity." Let the con-
struction of your sentences be simple enough for the
hearers to follow, and the words such as they cannot fail
to understand. To find themselves puzzled over your
meaning, and while they are still puzzling over your
last sentence, to be unable to attend to the next one,
annoys your hearers and lessens the chance of pleasing
or persuading them. Though obscurity of expression
is mostly due to obscurity of thought, it sometimes
happens that people whose thought is clear enough
insist on wrapping it up in vague and cloudy rhetoric.
To the rule that lucidity is the first of merits, there
is one exception, viz., where a speaker feels himself
driven to the shelter of obscurity. I have seen astute
debaters, compelled by their position to speak, unwill-
ing to be untruthful, yet forbidden by considerations
of prudence to speak out frankly all they thought, de-
liberately involve themselves in a web of words where
each sentence seemed to have a meaning, but the hearers
were left to wonder what the whole speech meant.

288 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

But such contingencies are rare ; you may go through
Hfe without getting caught in one.

5. In controversial speaking, as, for example, in
conducting a lawsuit or arguing a proposal in a delibera-
tive body, think always of what your opponent will
say, and so frame your speech as to anticipate his
answers and give little opening for his criticism.
The grounds of this rule are too obvious to need
illustration. Add to it the old maxim that in replying
you ought to meet and counter your adversary's jest
by earnest, and his earnest by jest. Aristotle said it,
but mother wit has taught it to many a man who
never heard of Aristotle.

6. Always reflect beforehand upon the kind of
audience you are likely to have, for even in the
same country or in the same section of the country
audiences are by no means the same, and what
suits one may not suit another. I have known
practised speakers throw overboard the speech they
had intended to deliver and substitute something
different when they looked from the platform over the
faces beneath. If your hearers are mostly educated
men and women, you may assume much as already
known which it would be proper to explain to persons
of scantier knowledge. But it is safer to proceed on
the assumption of ignorance (so long as you do not let
the audience think you are talking down to them) than
to assume knowledge. We are all of us more ignorant
than other people know, or indeed than we know our-

SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 289

selves. If the audience are disposed to be hostile,
you will begin by putting them in good humour
and trying to excite their curiosity as to the line you
will take. If they are already wearied by the ha-
rangues of your predecessors, you will go at them with
quick, sharp, bright, bold sentences, and will let them
feel that you do not mean to detain them long. And
you will watch them as you go along just as you would
watch your fly on the surface of the water you are
fishing.

7. Never despise those whom you address, whatever
you may think of their intellectual attainments. Give
them the best you have to give. You need not talk
over their heads, as I once heard an eminent English
historian, when he was candidate for a seat in Parlia-
ment, discourse to agricultural labourers upon the
Landesgemeinde of the Forest Cantons of Switzerland.
But you will find it politic as well as polite to respect
them, and you must never think that your best thoughts,
expressed in the fittest words, are too good for them.
Though noisy and empty rhetoric will often draw cheers,
still the masses of the common people almost always
appreciate solid and relevant facts, sound and useful
thoughts, stated in language they can understand,
and there wiU probably be among them those who
would perceive and resent any indication that you
were talking down to their inferior capacity.

8. Be sparing of literary ornament, except in
speeches that are of a frankly decorative kind, such

290 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

as those made after dinner, or panegyrics of some notable
person whom it is wished to honour. Just as an ornament
should seem when used in architecture, to be an orig-
inal and essential part of the whole design, so in oratory
the decorative parts should be connected with, and
naturally grow out of, the substance of the matter in
hand, and should help to make the speech more vivid
and telling, rather than seem stuck on in order to please
the ear without strengthening the sense. Abraham
Lincoln rendered a great service to American eloquence
when he renounced the florid or tawdry style that
prevailed in his day, and set an example of speaking
that was plain, direct, and terse. Be sparing \\dth
superlatives ; reserve them for occasions where they
will really tell. Take pains to choose the strong and
simple words, and the words that exactly fit the case.
Even an audience that is not itself very cultivated
feels the charm of choice and pointed diction, and of
words that have some touch of colour in them, such as
apt metaphors. A well chosen metaphor often clinches
an argument, or becomes an illustration of it in
miniature,

9. As respects humorous anecdotes, and jokes in
general, these are eminently matters of individual
taste, in which each man will please himself, and few
general counsels can be given. Though we all envy the
speaker who has plenty of merry jests, he needs to be-
ware of abusing his gift. There is a tendency to-day to
make after-dinner speaking a mere string of anecdotes,

SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 291

most of which may have Httle to do with the subject
or with one another. Even the best stories lose their
charm when they are dragged in by the head and
shoulders, having no connection with the allotted theme.
Relevance as well as brevity is the soul of wit, for a
good speech is a work of art, in which every part
should have an organic relation to every other part.
And when you tell a story, take some pains with the
form of it. The late Mr. James Russell Lowell, whom
we in England admired as the best after-dinner speaker
of his day, was a master in that line. The classical
felicity of his diction set off and gave a charm to the
smallest anecdote he told.

10. Never, if you can help it, be dull. It is a fault to
have too many flowers or too many fireworks, but it is a
worse fault to be tedious. An eminent Oxford teacher
of my undergraduate days, who is now a learned and
distinguished English writer, coined for his pupils a
phrase which had a great vogue in the university: "It
is better to be flippant than to be dull." This audacious
advice, meant for young writers, is even more appHca-
ble to young speakers, because, bad as dulness is in
print, it is still worse when you cannot escape from
it without quitting the dinner table. Many are the
causes of dreariness in a speech. One is lack of good
matter, for it often happens that the less a man has
to say, the more he spins it out. A still commoner
one is confused thinking, which makes the speaker
lose himself in vague and pointless phrases. Another

292 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

is monotony in language, the frequent repetition of
the same words, because the speaker's vocabulary is
scanty and he can command no others. You may
ask how dulness can be avoided when the subject is
not a lively one. Well, some subjects are dry. The
treasurer of a city, or even of a baseball club, who is
presenting his accounts, cannot make them fascinating.
But dryness is not the same thing as dulness. The least
promising subject may be treated with a conciseness and
precision and lucidity which allow one the pleasure that
good workmanship gives. A speech with those merits
will not be dull. Though it may be dry, it ^vill stand
out sharp and clear, like a bare mountain peak in the
desert of Arizona, and even to the driest topics you
can impart a little variety by a lively simile or an
apt illustration. Dulness is often the result merely of
monotony in voice and manner : and this brings me to
another maxim.

II. Remember the importance of DeHvery. De-
mosthenes, greatest of all orators, is reported to have
said when asked what was the chief quahty in oratory,
Delivery; and when asked what was the second and
again what was the third, to have made the same reply.
It is related that his own elocution and manner were at
first poor, and were improved by incessant study
and practice. And though a rich or sweet or sonorous
and resonant voice is a gift of nature, care and training
can do much to get good results out of a mediocre organ.
Articulation, modulation, and expression may all be

SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 293

cultivated. To listen to words clearly and finely spoken,
and to sentences in which the voice adapts itself to
the subject, adds greatly to whatever pleasure a speech
can give. However, the four suggestions I make to you
are applicable to all, be their voices good or bad. First,
Be sure you are heard. Better be silent than be in-
audible. Secondly, Do not shout. It is not necessary.
Take the measure of the room, look at the man in the
last row, throw your voice out so as to reach him,
watching his face to see if the words get there, and trust
not so much to loudness as to clearness of enunciation
and a measured delivery. Thirdly, Beware of exhaust-
ing your voice. Do not strain it, however large the
room, to its utmost power, at least until near the end
of your speech. Fourthly, Vary now and then the key
or pitch of your voice. It relieves the listener, and
to suddenly raise or lower the voice when there is any
change in the topic often helps the sense of the words.
A speech seems twice as long when it is delivered in a
monotone, and most speeches are too long already.

Were I addressing an English audience I should add a
fifth suggestion. Speak slowly. But the fault of going
too fast is far less common here than in Britain; in-
deed, some of your speakers tend to the opposite error
of going too slow. Dr. Phillips Brooks is the only
great American to whom I have ever listened who
spoke very rapidly. It may interest you to know that
John Bright, who was on the whole the greatest English
orator of the last half century, told me that when he

294 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

first began to speak in public his utterance was so rapid
that on one occasion a newspaper reported an address
he had made at a poKtical meeting in the following
words: "The next speech was made by our yoimg
townsman, Mr. John Bright, but he spoke so fast that
our reporter was quite unable to follow him." When
and after Bright had reached his prime, the measured
deliberation with which he delivered his sentences made
them tell like the blows of a hammer.

12. Never read from manuscript if you can help
it, unless when the occasion is one of such exceptional
solemnity or dignity that a long and highly finished
piece of composition is expected. As for notes, the
fewer the better, but if you find that you cannot trust
your memory to supply the order of the topics and the
particular points you wish to make, or illustrations you
wish to intersperse, it is better to refer to your notes
for these than to miss the points altogether. There
are speakers whose habit it is to carry notes in their
pocket even when they hope not to use them. It gives
confidence, and saves them from such a fiasco as I have
seen befall even practised debaters in the House of Com-
mons, when, having suddenly lost the thread of their
discourse, they were obliged to sink sadly to their seats,
amid the crushing commiseration of their opponents.

13. Whether you use notes or not, always have ready
two or three sentences with which to sit do\^Ti. You
need not be either flowery or sublime in your closing
words, but some sort of a peroration you ought to have

I

SOME fflNTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 295

at command, so as not to bungle and hesitate when
the time for ending comes. How often do we see an
unhappy fellow-creature go maundering or floundering
helplessly along, amid the growing contempt of the
audience, having already said all he had got to say,
and yet imable to stop because he feels that a closing
sentence is needed and he cannot find one.

14. Lastly — • and this is a maxim which is of universal
application. Never weary your audience. If they are
tired before you rise to speak, cut your speech short,
unless you feel able to freshen them up and dispel their
weariness. Just as physicians say that a man ought to
leave off eating while he is still hungry enough to go
on eating, so let your hearers wish for more food from
you, rather than feel they have had too much already.
Consider the hour of the evening and human weakness.
One of the most successful speeches I remember to have
heard of was made by a famous engineer at a great
public dinner of the British Association for the Ad-
vancement of Science. He came last; and midnight
had arrived. His toast was Applied Science, and his
speech was as follows: "Ladies and Gentlemen, at this
late hour I advise you to illustrate the Applications
of Science by applying a lucifer match to the wick of
your bedroom candle. Let us aU go to bed."

It might be rash to say that a short speech is never a
bad speech, for I have known a man grieve his friends
and ruin his case in five minutes. But for ten speeches
that are too short there are a hundred that are too long.

296 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

A lecture ought not to exceed fifty minutes, a sermon
twenty-five minutes, an after-dinner speech (unless of
course it is meant to be the chief address of the even-
ing) fifteen minutes. For speeches in law-courts or
legislatures, where a mass of facts may have to be ex-
pounded and commented on, limits cannot be fixed,
but all speeches, ever3rwhere, gain by compression.
Mr. Bright, like Chatham and most of our great
orators, seldom spoke for more than an hour. Mr.
Gladstone, like Edmund Burke, did not so restrict him-
self, and both these illustrious men suffered from their
copiousness so far as the audience of the moment was
concerned, though no one could wish Burke's magnifi-
cent orations, as we now have them in print, to be
shorter by a sentence. Like Daniel Webster's, they
are good all through.

The maxim not to tire or bore your audience is
part of a wider precept; viz., to remember the main
purpose of a speech. Most speakers are beset, espe-
cially in their earlier days, by a temptation from which
even those of longer experience are not exempt, the
temptation to regard a speech as the opportunity for
displaying talent rather than as a means to an end.

The aims or ends of speaking are commonly classed
as two. One is to Persuade. The other is to Delight.
In order to persuade a court or a jury you must think
not of showing off your theoretical gifts, but of getting
the judgment or the verdict. The best speech is the
speech that convinces court or jury. In a legislative

SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 297

body, the best speech is that which draws votes, or,
if that be impossible, which puts heart into your own
party. When the speech is meant not to persuade,
but to give delight, there are three quarters in which
pleasure may be felt; the person in whose honour the
speech is made, the audience, and yourself. It is a
common error to think too much of the last and too
little of the second. So long as you are mindful to say
nothing unworthy of yourself, nothing untrue, nothing
vulgar, you had better forget yourself altogether and
think only of the audience, how to get them and how to
hold them. Keep your mind fixed upon your hearers
and upon the end in view, whether it be to please
or to convince. Appreciation will come if it is deserved,
and wUl come all the more if you do not too obviously
play for it.

You will sometimes make failures, for nobody is
always at his best. Do not be discouraged. The
fault may not be your own, for much depends on con-
ditions you cannot command. But when you feel you
have fallen below the best that you can do, ask your-
self why, and if the fault is in yourself, try to correct
it next time.

SPECIAL AND GENERAL EDUCATION IN
UNIVERSITIES

Address Delivered on Commemoration Day at Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, February 22D, 1911.

SPECIAL AND GENERAL EDUCATION IN
UNIVERSITIES

Address Delivered on Commemoration Day at Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, February 220, 1911.

Your University looks back to-day upon thirty-five
years of educational v^ork v^hich has been of permanent
significance for all the seats of learning and study in
the English-speaking countries of the world. The
conception of creating a University which should
provide in various branches of knowledge advanced
courses to be taken by men who had completed
their general liberal education, was then a compara-
tively novel one in those countries; and it requires
an effort to carry oneself back to a time when the
now elaborate machinery of post-graduate courses,
which has been spreading itself through the leading
universities in the United States, did not exist. To the
Johns Hopkins University belongs the honour of having
first put into practice this fertile conception, and of
having carried it out with a thoroughness to which its
diffusion and its success are very largely due. The
name of your late admirable President will always be
associated in the educational history of North America
with this epoch-making " new departure," and the

301

302 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

University has always since lived up to the standard
of thoroughness, and preference of real work to dis-
play, from which it started. Its adherence to that
standard, its continued embodiment of the ideal of
scientific perfection, have given it the position of in-
fluence and dignity which it now occupies in the
world.

A remarkable feature of the thirty-five years over
which you look back is the wonderful development of
many departments of human knowledge, and espe-
cially of those which are concerned with the sciences
of nature, into special branches, each of which has been
tending to become more distinct from the others. So
far from finding ourselves approaching the end of
knowledge, we find that the more we know the more
remains beyond to be known, and that the realm of
the unknown seems to be steadily increasing with
every addition to our knowledge. It is as though the
particular path which we are following was always di-
verging into a number of different paths which tend to
separate from one another, and each of which leads into
untrodden solitudes to which we see no end. Within
the recollection of most of us, new branches of science
have made good their place, and have become recog-
nized as separate fields of enquiry, and along with
this it has befallen that the great majority of scientific
enquirers now begin, as soon as their general scientific
education has been completed, to devote themselves
to one particular branch of investigation and throw

SPECIALISM IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 303

their whole energy into pushing it forward. A man
is now not a "natural philosopher" in the old sense
of the term, but belongs to some one of the specific
branches into which natural philosophy has become
divided. The mass of papers and articles upon all
the branches of science that fills the weekly and
monthly and quarterly and yearly magazines and
reports of proceedings of learned bodies in all civil-
ized countries, is now so vast that the most powerful
intellect cannot follow and keep pace with what is
being accomplished even in its o"wn special branch.
Indices and books designed to be guides to the ever
accumulating pile increase in number, but do not
meet our needs. In chemistry, for instance, there is
published every year a body of facts greater than all that
stood recorded in the days of Black and Priestley.
The same thing has happened in those practical arts
which depend upon the application of science. They,
too, have multiplied by division, and thus new prac-
tical professions, each employing many thousands of
persons, such as photography and electrical engineer-
ing, have grown up, which were unknown seventy
years ago.

The same thing has, of necessity, happened in uni-
versity education. We have now in all duly organized
universities professors of a large number of distinct
branches of knowledge which were formerly lumped
together as being one branch under one professor.
When I was a student in the University of Glasgow,

304 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

and also in that of Oxford, I remember that there
was in each but one professor of physics.

So also among students the tendency is for those who
have advanced some way to begin to concentrate their
efforts upon one particular line of study and investi-
gation. Both the teacher and the student are naturally
fascinated by the prospect of discovery. The professor
likes best to lecture upon the subject in which he is
pushing forward his own investigations, and the stu-
dent is able to find in them the most attractive field
of experimental research.

This sort of specialization has become inevitable,
but there is a consequence attached to it which ap-
pears almost equally inevitable, yet in some aspects
regrettable. Part of the time which was pre\dously
given to general study, i.e. to a knowledge both of nat-
ural science in general and of other non-scientific sub-
jects, must needs be now devoted to this special study.

The field of nature is unlimited. Human curiosity
is unlimited. But human life and the capacity for
using our time and our powers in the acquisition of
knowledge remain within very narrow bounds. It
would be rash to set limits to what scientific research,
such as that which members of the brilliant medical
faculty of this University carry on, may effect in
the way both of extending human life and of mak-
ing health more vigorous and thus impro\-ing the
working powers of the mind. Still, life is short, ter-
ribly short for all that we want to learn and do, and

SPECIALISM IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 305

there is no present prospect that it will be much pro-
longed. Has it not sometimes occurred to you what
a pity it is that the immense length of working years
which mankind is said to have enjoyed in the days
before the Flood, when scientific investigations, so far
as we know, were slender, and directed to purely prac-
tical ends, could not have been reserved for times like
our own, in which a long life is more needed for utiliz-
ing the accumulated knowledge and skill a great
scholar and student can bring to bear upon the ma-
terials that now lie before us ? What might not Dar-
win or Helmholtz or Kelvin or Mommsen or Ranke or
the distinguished historian whom America has lately
lost, Mr. Henry C. Lea, have accomplished with a
working life extended in some proportion to the vaster
fields of enquiry that attract us to-day ?

The problem which now confronts us in all univer-
sities is how to find time both for these speciaHzed
studies, which are daily becoming more absorbing, and
also for the obtaining that kind of survey and com-
prehension of the general field of human knowledge
which is necessary in order to make the university
graduate a truly educated and cultivated man, capable
of seeing the relation of his own particular study to
others and of appreciating the various methods by
which discovery is prosecuted. This problem of recon-
ciHng special with general study, although most urgent
in the sciences of nature, shows itself in what may be
called the human subjects also. In history, for instance,

3o6 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

one now finds people who devote themselves entirely
to one period of history, and will complacently teU
you, when a question belonging to some other time is
raised, that they know nothing about it because it is
"not in their period." So there are people who give
themselves up so entirely to the study of economic
history that they may know very Uttle of ci\dl or
ecclesiastical history in general.

However, it is chiefly in the sciences of nature that
the difficulty I am referring to arises. These are now
tending to overshadow all other studies, partly be-
cause the numerous practical applications to which
they are turned have acquired immense industrial
importance for men and nations, and partly also
because we are all fascinated by the progress of dis-
covery, and are so eager to attain certitude that we
are disposed to turn from those enquiries in which
complete certitude is unattainable to those in which
the laws of nature provide an absolutely firm basis.
And it is in the natural sciences that the subdivision
and specialization referred to have gone farthest.

The problem has accordingly two aspects. It
raises the question of a mastery of the principles
of the sciences of nature in general as against a
highly specialized study of some one department in
those sciences. It also raises the question of the re-
spective claims of the study of physical science, or
some branch of it, as against the claims of what may
be called the human sciences, or, if you prefer it, hu-

SPECIALISM IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 307

manistic subjects. It is upon this latter aspect that
I have a few observations to submit.

What do we mean by general intellectual cultivation
as opposed to special knowledge ? Without attempt-
ing a complete definition — nothing is more dangerous
than a definition — I will suggest a description. We
mean such a knowledge of the main facts and distinc-
tive methods of various branches of human knowledge
as furnishes a general idea of the relations of each
branch to other branches ; that is to say, a comprehen-
sion of what truth and certitude mean in different de-
partments of study, and of what are the various paths
by which truth may be reached or approached. Were
I asked to indicate what this would include, I should
make some such answer as this : In the sphere of
natural science, it would include a knowledge not
necessarily wide, but sound and exact so far as it went,
of a deductive science such as geometry, and of some
science of observation such as a branch of natural his-
tory, geology, for instance, or some department of
biology, or of such an experimental science as chemis-
try. On the human side, it would include a knowl-
edge of one at least among what may be called the
more abstract subjects, such as psychology (in the
older sense) or logic or ethics, and of one of the more
observational subjects such as economics or politics.
It would include a knowledge of the principles of
language, and of at least one foreign tongue, ancient
or modern, preferably an inflected tongue possess-

308 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

ing a literature. And, finally, it must include the
record of human effort and development through
the ages, that is to say, history, which shows us how
man has grown from what he was in the past to be
what he is in the present, and holds out hopes of what
he may be in the future. Without at least an elemen-
tary knowledge of these matters, no man is properly
equipped for a life of study and thought, or for those
branches of the practical work of life which require a
wide intellectual outlook. It is not necessary to-day,
as it would have been fifty years ago, to argue that
every educated man should have some knowledge of
deductive science and of the observational and experi-
mental sciences of nature. But it is beginning to be
necessary to vindicate for the other great department
of enquiry, that which relates to Man, its rightful
place in a general scheme of education.

Specialization is not only inevitable for the progress
of discovery, but in many minor ways excellent. It is
a splendid thing for a great university like this to have
among its professors men each of whom is abreast of
the highest development of some particular line of en-
quiry and knows how that line of enquiry ought to be
prosecuted, so that it holds within its o^^^l walls, so to
speak, an accumulated mass of various knowledge, rep-
resenting that to which the world has yet attained. The
scientific specialist makes interesting company — when
I have a chance I always try to get beside him at
dinner — because he is able to tell us what we seek to

SPECIALISM IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 309

know of the progress of discovery in the growing
sciences, and we have only to interrogate him to get
at once, without the labour of consulting books, the lat-
est results in the clearest form. The scientific investi-
gator, moreover, seems to have on the whole the happi-
est kind of life that is now possible. Does he know
how happy he is ? Engaged in the discovery of truth, he
has for his helpers all others engaged in the same pur-
suit, and feels that all his labours are working to-
wards a noble and useful end. He is free from the
vexations that beset the business man or the lawyer
or the politician. He depends on no man's favour.
He is not expected to say anything of whose truth he
entertains secret doubts. If he has not a happy life,
granted good health, it is probably his own fault, for
what more can one desire than to be, as Bacon says,
the interpreter as well as the servant of Nature ?

Admitting all this, and much more that might be
said about the interest and pleasure of enquiry con-
centrated on one department, it is nevertheless right
to present to you some dangers that seem to arise
from the immense extension of the specializing ten-
dency and from the predominance, in particular, of the
study of the natural sciences to the exclusion of other
topics. We are accustomed to divide the subjects of
enquiry into two great departments ; those, the human
subjects, in which we deal with probable matter, and
that field of Nature in which all is fixed, certain, posi-
tive, immutable. Some one may, to be sure, remark

3IO UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

that the phenomena of nature may possibly be under-
going some slow process of change. We cannot be
sure that oxygen and hydrogen may not be different
now from what they once were, or that alterations
may not conceivably occur in the proportion of the
constituents present in compound chemical bodies.
However that is all speculation. For our present pur-
poses, we think of the sciences of nature as being occu-
pied with that which is permanent and unchangeable.
They deal with those laws which we believe, so far as
our knowledge goes, to be immutable, to have been
operative in the past and likely to be operative in the
future, even as they are operative now. Now he whose
whole time and thoughts are given to the study of
these unchanging laws does not learn thereby how to
deal with that which is mutable and transient. But
the mutable and the transient include not only most
of what concerns our daily life, but the whole immense
field of knowledge which covers the human subjects.
Here we deal not with the Certain but with the
Probable. The realm of ideas, beliefs, theories,
emotions, institutions, habits, — in fact, the entire
realm of human thought, human society, human
conduct, belongs to the sphere of the transitory and
changeable. In investigating the phenomena of this
realm, we have to walk by methods which are not
only not the same as those which belong to the sci-
ences of nature, but differ from the latter by being
far more intricate. The investigation of probable

SPECIALISM IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 311

matter is more perplexing and less satisfying because
its results are less definite and positive than are those
enquiries at the end of which stands, like a statue
closing a vista between trees, the figure of certain and
immutable Truth. Those accordingly who try to ap-
ply to the human subjects the same formulae and
methods which they apply to nature are in danger of
failing when they enter the field which includes his-
tory and all political or social phenomena. Differences
in the subject matter imply differences in the proper
mode of treatment. As men erred five centuries ago
when they tried to explain nature by applying to her
their own crudely formed abstract notions, so now it
is an error to think that in probable matter the methods
applicable to natural phenomena can be so applied as to
attain equally certain and definite conclusions. Does it
not follow that an education in the methods proper to
these last-named historical and social fields is as needful
as is a knowledge of the methods of physical enquiry ?
Sixty years ago people complained, and complained
justly, of the narrowness of those persons, some of
them of the highest eminence, who had been trained
entirely on the old scheme of education, which largely
consisted in grammatical studies, and especially in a
knowledge of the ancient languages. Men so trained,
men highly gifted and instructed, often failed to appre-
I ciate the interest and value of the study of nature, and
showed a strange incapacity to understand the processes
fit employs. I remember some such among our leading

312 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

English statesmen. A whole world of interests and
pleasures was closed to them by an ignorance that was
too often self-complacent. In travelling, for instance,
distinguished historians did not see, because they had
not been taught to observe, all sorts of natural features
in a country which might have helped them to under-
stand its history. Bacon has warned us against that ab-
sorption in a particular set of ideas, that prepossession
in favor of one particular view which he classes among
the Idola Specus, the phantasms of the Cave, which
surround the man who sits in the dark recesses of his
own remote and secluded thought unillumined by the
light of the broad sky. So now the devotion to any
special study, whether in the sphere of natural science
or in any other, tends to narrow the mind and prevents
its faculties from attaining their highest development.
Many of the greatest discoveries have arisen from
bringing together facts and ideas drawn from different
regions whose relations had not previously been dis-
cerned. The more you extend the range of knowledge,
the more you increase the chances of such discoveries.
Most of the great men to whom the progress of science
is due were in their early days trained not as specialists,
but had minds that ranged far and wide like keen-
eyed eagles over the vast field of knowledge.

The chief end of education is to stimulate curiosity,
to make a man ask about all thmgs, be they famihar
or unfamiliar, the How and the Why, to discover
matter for enquiry in facts which other people have

SPECIALISM IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 313

passed over without thinking of the problems they
suggest, to retain that activity and versatility and
freshness which are the most characteristic marks of
a forceful and creative intellect. Is it not wonderful
how many things were overlooked in the past which
we now perceive to need investigation ? The ancients,
both in the Greek and in the ItaHan lands, must, for
instance, have noticed how various are the aspects and
structure of different kinds of rock. The differences
between gneiss and limestone, between basalt and
slate, stared them in the face. They saw fossil shells
in the strata. But though observant men like Herod-
otus sometimes noted facts which suggested the work-
ing of forces that had changed the earth's surface, it
did not occur to them to seek any general explana-
tion of these phenomena, and geological science is not
yet two centuries old. So ancient observers described
plants and were interested in their pharmaceutical

(properties; they described tribes of men and some-
times raised questions as to their forms of speech, but
it did not occur to them to classify either the plants or
languages on any scientific principles. Hippocrates
was a great physician, scientific in his methods. Why
did his successors not carry them on with a persever-

Iance and exactitude which would have produced great
results? Was it because they had given themselves
too much to the study of words and of rhetoric, and
because their brilliant dialectical gifts had drawn them
away from the observation of facts? One wonders
I

314 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

how it happened that a race so wonderfully gifted as
were the Greeks, who seemed frequently on the very
edge of great discoveries in physical science, did
not find and pursue the paths which have led us
to the unveiling of the secrets of Nature. And one
wonders also whether there are any phenomena which
we now are passing by unexamined because it has
never struck us that they deserve enquiry.

The wider the range of a man's interests, the more
susceptible he is to ideas of many kinds, so much greater
is the pleasure which life can afford him, and so much
the better can he contribute to the progress of the
world both by stimulating others and by himself
pointing out the way in which advances can be made.
Different as are the phenomena in different parts of
the field of knowledge, and different in some re-
spects as are even the methods to be applied, the habit
of keen observation and steady reflection formed in any
department quickens a man's powers in every other;
and just as an historian will profit by knowing some-
thing of geology or botany, so a student of natural
history may profit by knowing how the human mind
used to approach nature before our modem methods
had come into being. A university has to think not
only of forming specialists, but of making these special-
ists better by giving them a wide range of knowledge,
and still more of sending out men who sustain the level
of taste and insight in the whole community and are
fit to be its intellectual leaders.

SPECIALISM IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 315

You may ask how time is to be found both for special
studies and for the sort of general cultivation that I
have tried to describe. Must the general studies pre-
cede specialization, or is it possible to carry them on
together, and to show young men, even in their last uni-
versity year, how to correlate their special scientific stud-
ies with a mastery of other fields ? These are practical
questions which I must leave to your superior com-
petence. The principle which we seem chiefly called
upon to uphold is the principle of breadth and catholic-
ity in education, the recognition not only of the duty of
a great university to provide teaching in all the main
subjects, but also of the truth that a one-sided educa-
tion is an imperfect education. The error of those
who a century ago deemed a grammatical and literary
curriculum sufficient was no greater than is that of
those who now dispute and seek to exclude the hu-
man subjects ; or who hold that any single branch
either of the human or of the natural subjects is
enough to inform the mind or to develop and polish
it to its highest efiQciency.

THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE

Address to the University of Michigan Chapter op the
$BK Society, April, 1911.

k

THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE

Address to the University of Michigan Chapter of the
<J>BK Society, April, 1911.

Not long ago I read in an American novel this
sentence : "The life of an American man is Business."
If this merely meant that Business is the dominant fea-
ture in the life of the United States, occupying most
of men's time and thoughts, it is true, and scarcely less
true of such countries as England and Germany. As it
is everybody's first need everywhere to make an income
sufficient to support himself and his family, so in a
country which is still in the stage of swift material
development and where opportunities abound for the
exercise of practical talent and the amassing of large
fortunes, commerce and industry and such professions
as engineering and law must necessarily hold the fore-
most place.

But the sentence may also mean that the normal
American man thinks and cares for nothing but business ;
and that was probably the sense intended by the writer.
If this were true, you as University men would think
it ought not to be true, and would deem it disparag-
ing to your universities. Of all the countries of the
world, the United States is that in which the largest

319

320 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

proportion of university graduates enter a business
career, or conversely, it is the country in which the
largest proportion of men engaged in business have
received a university education. Now one main use
of that education is to prevent business from being the
whole of an American man's life; in other words, its
aim is to give him intellectual interests and tastes
outside business. Whatever a man's active career,
be it commercial business or any other, he finds it hard
to maintain those other interests under the constant
pressure of the practical work of life. That is why
university teaching ought to try to root them so deeply
in the mind and give them such a hold on our affection
that they will resist the pressure.

Two generations ago the study of ancient literature
held a foremost place among those intellectual interests,
and not a few university men used to go on reading and
drawing pleasure from the Greek and Latin classics
through the whole of their lives. These writings
had become a part of their minds. Few men so read
now; few in Europe, still fewer here. The study of
Latin has shrunk to narrow dimensions, and that of
Greek is in many universities practically extinct. In the
West both languages are more studied by women
than by men. An association has, however, been
founded for defending, and if possible extending,
classical studies. As its headquarters are planted in
this great university, you may naturally wish to hear
some remarks upon the case to be made for those

THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 321

studies, for they can no longer rely on tradition but
must support their claim by definite and positive argu-
ments which will appeal to a public that is now, both
in Europe and here, bent upon the practically useful,
and somewhat prejudiced against every habit which
the (now discredited) "wisdom of our ancestors"
favoured.

Let us begin by frankly admitting that the excessive
importance given a century ago to the languages of
Greece and Rome has prejudiced them m the modern
eye. The claims made for them were so extravagant as
to have disparaged their real merits. We may more-
over doubt whether some of the arguments used on
their behalf have much weight. Grammar is a useful
study if taught in a rational way, so as to induce
thought, and not by forcing wretched chOdren to
repeat its rules by rote. It is also true that the
grammar of inflected and synthetic languages affords
better mental training than does that of French or
German, which it is proposed to substitute for Latin,
not to speak of English, the grammar of which is
perhaps better left untaught altogether. Nevertheless,
the advantages of learning Greek and Latin grammar
[have been exaggerated, and it has absorbed an undue
share of the learner's time and toil.

It used also to be argued that a knowledge of Latin
was serviceable because it explained the etymology of
many English words, and because it was a gateway lead-
ing into the modern Romance languages. Both con-

322 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

siderations have a certain weight, but in education there
are now so many subjects competing for the student's
time that a stronger case must be made for each sub-
ject than was thought necessary two centuries ago.
More importance may perhaps be allowed to the
argument that the learning of any language besides
one's own is of value to the mind, because the mere
process of turning thought expressed in one set of
words into another set of words is in itself a training in
thought, and tends to enlarge the range of a man's
ideas by suggesting different ways of expressing them.
But there again, though the argument is a sound one,
it has not proved sufficient to carry conviction to any
minds except those who have given serious thought to
educational subjects. Most people say that the result
is not adequate to the time spent in learning an ancient
language, and that if it is desirable to possess some
language besides one's own, why not learn French or
German or Spanish, in which there is a prospect of an
immediate return of profit upon the capital of the time
invested by the learner.

You have got to face the fact that to the large major-
ity of men nowadays, whatever relates to the past
seems obsolete and useless — " What difference can it
make to us now," they say, "what men did or wrote or
thought twenty centuries ago ? Their ideas may have
been good when first expressed, but we have got far
beyond them. They supposed that the sun went round
the earth. They did not use steam or electricity, and

THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 323

did not even know the composition of air and of water.
Of what value can their writings be to us ?"

Even those of your antagonists who admit the value
and charm of good literature will tell you that there is
in our own language literature more than sufficient
to occupy all the time that the learner can spare for
that side of education. "If few persons know more
than three or four plays of Shakespeare, if few edu-
cated men of this generation have read through
Paradise Lost, why send us to Homer or ^Eschylus
when we can get what is just as good in our own
tongue and yet do not generally care to get it ?"
I These are the views, this is the attitude of mind
which confronts you in your efforts to advocate the
study of the ancient classics. Your difficulty is that
there is very little common ground between you and
them. Your conception of education differs from that
which is now popular, and your sense of the value of the
ancient classics is incommunicable, because it springs
from a personal knowledge which nowadays com-
paratively few possess.

Accordingly, in suggesting to you what seem to me
the strongest considerations by which your contention
can be supported, I must make two preliminary
remarks.

One is that I submit these considerations in no belief
that they will prove effective with those you seek to
convince. They are given only in the hope that they
may confirm you in your own convictions, and possi-

324 UNIVERSITY AND fflSTORICAL ADDRESSES

bly make clearer to you the grounds of those convic-
tions.

The other remark is that it is too late to attempt to
restore to Greek and Latin the place they held in the
scheme of liberal education seventy years ago. It is
not to be desired that they should recover it, because
the percentage of pupils who derived substantial
and permanent profit was a small percentage. You
may say that this was largely due to the unintelligent
character of the old teaching, which dwelt upon gram-
mar and neglected literature. Still the fact remains
that under any system of teaching more than a half of
the boys in schools and undergraduates in colleges
who may be taught Latin, and five-sixths of those
who may be taught Greek, will not get far enough to
enjoy the literature and give it a permanent hold on
their minds. Your efforts must, therefore, be directed
towards securing that there shall always be a provision
of classical teaching sufficient to enable those who
show aptitude for these studies to pursue them, and
that the universities shall, by their degree regulations,
or otherwise, impress upon the student the high value
attaching to such a mastery of the two languages as
will open to him the enjoyment of the literatures they
contain. How many thousands of students annually
graduate in the faculty of arts from all the universities
of the United States I do not know — doubtless more
than ten thousand. What you desire is, I assume,
that of these thousands of graduates there should always

THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 325

be some hundreds (besides those who intend to be
clerg5anen or university teachers) who can read Herod-
otus and Plato with pleasure, and when they wish to
be sure of the meaning of a passage in the New Testa-
ment will go to the original Greek for help.

Now can we find grounds to show that it is in the
interest of the nation that there should always be, say,
this five per cent or upwards. You probably agree in the
view that it is in the literature of the ancient languages
that their real value lies, not in a knowledge of their
grammar, nor in the help they can afford to the lawyer
or physician or clergyman in his profession, consider-
able as that help may be. What then is the special
value of these ancient literatures ? Do they give us
anything, and if so, what, that we cannot equally well
obtain from modern literature ?

There has never been an era in the history of the
civilized peoples when they were all so entirely and
almost exclusively occupied with the present as they are
to-day. The Romano-Hellenic world lived upon the
Greek literature of the times from Homer downwards
and based education upon it. In the Dark Ages and
Middle Ages men were constantly looking back to
[the ancient world as a sort of golden age and were
cherishing every fragment that had come down to
them therefrom. The scholars and thinkers of the
Renaissance who obtained those Greek books for
which their predecessors had vainly sighed, drew from
those books their inspiration. It was they that lit

326 UNIVERSITY AND fflSTORICAL ADDRESSES

up the fires of new literary effort in Italy, France,
Spain, Germany, Britain; and thereafter two cen-
turies were spent in commenting on and imitating the
classical authors. The Bible and the Fathers of the
Church had been the intellectual food of the clergy
down to the age of the Reformation, and from that
time Protestants as well as Roman Catholics were
employed till the middle of the eighteenth century
in expounding and arguing about the doctrines of
Christianity. All through those centuries, past events
and past writings occupied the minds of men (though
history was not much taught as history) and were
a large part of the instruction given in schools and
universities. Many ancient books continued to be
treated as models of excellence long after some better
books on similar subjects had been produced in a
modern tongue. Even in this new country, the edu-
cated men of your Revolutionary period were brought
up on Greek and Latin authors and learnt a great
deal about the ancient world. You had not then made
history for yourselves. In our time, however, we see
phenomena altogether different. Theology engages
much less of the average man's thoughts, while persons
of a specially religious cast of mind are occupied far
more with good works and what are called social ques-
tions than with the Bible or Christian history.

Natural science has filled the void left by the dimin-
ished interest in the things of the past. It concerns
itself entirely with the present, or rather with a world

THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 327

in which time does not exist and in which therefore
there is no past. Even among those who know Httle
or nothing about any branch of science the impression
prevails that science and its appHcations are the form
of knowledge that now counts for success in life.

The social and political changes in progress since 1 789,
and most evidently during the last thirty years both
here and in Europe, have raised in the social scale, and
have provided instruction for, classes which had been
previously illiterate, so that the standard in literature,
and especially in ephemeral literature, is no longer
fixed by a small, highly educated class, but is the result-
ant of the tastes and notions of various classes, — some
of them on a low level of knowledge. Newspapers, in
particular, are written primarily with a view to circu-
lation, and to the income from advertisements which
circulation insures; that is, they are written for the
masses of the people. Now for the masses, the past,
with its heroes, its achievements, its literature, has
little meaning. Their education has not given them
the opportunity of knowing or caring about it. Their
rise has increased the already overmastering impulse
towards elements of practical utility in education.

There used to be one fountain whence the whole
body of the people drew ideas that carried them back
into the past and touched their imagination by pre-
senting figures and scenes very unlike their own daily
life. That was the Bible. It is now unhappily less
familiar than formerly to every class in the community.

328 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

A smaller proportion of both the richer and the poorer
classes attend church than was the case a century ago,
and whoever has been in the habit, in public addresses,
of referring or alluding to Biblical incidents or of using
Biblical phrases, perceives that he cannot now assume,
as he could have done forty years ago, that a large pro-
portion of his audience would recognize the reference
or the phrase.

Thus in many ways and through divers influences,
men of to-day are now more purely children of the
present than was any previous generation. This is
even more true of North America than of Europe, for
here there are far fewer things to recall the past, fewer
links binding the present to it. Among the mass of
the people interest in the past goes back hardly farther
than to the Revolutionary War, and it is only the ex-
cellent society of Colonial Dames who exert themselves
to recall to the public events of earlier date. Only the
best educated men seem to duly realize the continuity
of American history with European history, and to feel
that all that happened in Europe before the middle of
the seventeenth century, as well as a good deal that has
happened since, is a part of your American history
and has gone to the making you what you are.

Now although the world may be weary of the past, as
Shelley said a hundred years ago, it cannot shake itself
clear of the past. You here and we in Europe may be
eagerly bent on the future, resolved to make it better for
the bulk of mankind than the past has been. But we

I

I

THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 329

can conjecture the future only from what we know of
the past, that is to say, from what we know of human
nature and the processes by which it and human
institutions change. One who knows only his own
country and people does not really know them, because
it is only by knowing something of other countries
and their peoples that he can tell which characteristics
of his own people are normal, generally present in all
peoples, and which are peculiar to his own. So, likewise,
he who knows only his own time does not really know it,
for he cannot distinguish between the characteristics that
are transient and those that are permanent. This is the
main use of history, besides of course the pleasure which
all knowledge gives. To know what we are, we must
know how we came to be what we are, and must realize
that we shall before long pass into something different.

A profitable knowledge of history consists not so
much in remembering events, — wars and treaties, and
the making of constitutions and the reigns and charac-
ters of kings or presidents, — as in knowing what men
were like in the days that are gone. What were their
aims and hopes and pleasures and beliefs ? How did
they think and feel ?

The best source of that knowledge is, for any period
of the past, to be found in the literature it produced,
for that was the natural expression of its life, given
forth through its more gifted spirits, and that is a record
which, being contemporary and spontaneous, cannot
have been perverted, as narratives of fact sometimes

330 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

are, by those who come after. Thus the periods which
we can study with most profit are those which have left
us not only a record of events, but also a rich and
noble literature contemporaneous with the events
through which the soul of the people, its ideas and its
impulses, revealed itself in action. History is the study
of human nature and is best studied when one has the
means of interpreting men's acts by their thoughts and
their thoughts by their acts. Literature gives a picture
which is in so far imperfect that it tells us less than we
desire to know about the ordinary man because it
proceeds from the more powerful minds who have the
faculty of expression. But it speaks with a compensat-
ing vividity.

Nobody can hope to comprehend many historical
periods through their literature as well as by familiarity
with their events. We must select a few for study.
Now there is one period which has three recommenda-
tions making it more instructive than any other. It is
the best general introduction to all historical study and
to all literary study. This is the classical age of Greece
and Rome, and the three things that recommend it
are the following: —

I. It is the beginning of literature and practically
the beginning of history, its first great product, the
Homeric poems, antedating even the earliest prophets
of Israel whose utterances have come down to us in the
Old Testament. As the most beautiful hour of the
day is the Dawn, though city dwellers seldom see it,

I

THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 331

and as the most winning time of the year is the Spring,
so there is a peculiar charm in the first efforts man
made in the supreme art of poetry. Simplicity and
directness, sometimes joined to exuberant imagination,
delight us in most of the earlier literature of all nations.
We find them in the old Celtic poetry and the old
Arabian poetry, in the Eddaic poems and the Sagas of
Iceland, in the Lay of the Nibelungs, in the Vedas, in
the ballads of our own race, from the song of the battle
of Brunanburh, down to the ballads of Chevy Chase
and Flodden. But in the early poetry of Greece these
qualities are united to a constructive power and an
artistic sense which can be found nowhere else. Even
in the Attic dramatists and the later Greek lyrists
something of the primal simplicity remains.

II. The literature and institutions and civilization of
Greece and Rome are for aU the modern nations the
first fountain heads of that European civilization
which has swept down to us in a widened current.
Art, the drama, philosophy, geometry, speculations in
the field of politics as well as in the fields of physical
enquiry, all begin with the Greeks : there is hardly a
branch of intellectual achievement that is not traceable
to them. So from Rome descend the institutions of
law and government under which the modern world
lives, though modified in Great Britain and America
by Teutonic ideas and traditions. In the history of
the ancients we see our own beginnings and compre-
hend them better. We see also the environment into

332 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

which Christianity was born and the influences that
affected its growth, moulded its forms of worship, gave
it a dogmatic system and a hierarchy. No later period
has therefore the same importance for modern peoples as
that of Romano-Hellenic civiKzation, for out of it there
sprang that which is common to all the nations of the
modern world and which they possess as a joint heritage.
III. The literature of these two languages better
illustrates their history, and the history stands in closer
relation to the literature, than is the case with any
other of the more recent national literatures. It is,
moreover, all the fitter to be studied, because while it
is as a whole scanty, compared with modern literature,
it contains an unusually large proportion of work of ex-
traordinary merit. We are accustomed to deplore the
loss of many works of great ancient authors. Some
have specially mourned over the lost books of Livy and
Tacitus, some over Lucilius and Varro, some over what
has perished of vEschylus, but perhaps the greatest loss
has been that of nearly all the Greek lyric poetry except
the Odes of Pindar. Still we may console ourselves -^dth
the reflection that so much that has reached us came
from the pens of the best writers, and that so much of
what has survived is fijst-rate. No people, not even
the Italian, has produced so large a body of poetr>^ of
the highest order as the Greeks did, except our o^^^l
English or British stock. It is the union of the histor-
ical interest which the Greek republics inspire with the
splendour of the literature they produced that gives to

THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 333

both of them their unique charm. Works quite as
great have been produced since. Modern literature is
not only far wider in its range but richer in the variety
of its content. It is dangerous to speak of ancient
literature as a whole, for great is the diversity be-
tween the earliest Greek poets and the later writers,
either Greek or Roman. But nearly all, as compared
with the modern, have that special flavour and charm,
and also that special value for this old and complex
civilization of ours which the efforts of a joyous, vigor-
ous, and sensitive race possess.

III. Just as the political ideas of Greece and the
political institutions of Rome were a point of departure
for the modern world, so Greek and Latin authors, and
especially the poets, have become the common stock of
the learned men, the thinkers and the writers, of all
modern countries. They formed the mind of Europe
from the fifteenth till the eighteenth century. Their
ideas, their literary forms, their canons of taste, are
the foundation of that general modern culture which
educated men are still assumed to possess. No other
literature, except the Bible and a very few of what may
be called the classic books of Christianity, is in the
same sense a link between different nations and has
become equally the property of all.

These are some of the reasons which give its incom-
parable value and stimulative power to the history, and
still more to the literature, of classical antiquity. It
can never grow old, for it has the vivacity and

I

334 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

vitality of youth. Its ideas retain their charm, partly
because they are simple, partly because they are ex-
pressed with unrivalled felicity. They light up the
history of their times because the life and mind of the
people speak so directly through them. This undying
freshness gives them that strange quality of seeming at
once so far off and so near, just as our own earliest boy-
hood often seems nearer to us than do the years of middle
life because it has the vividness of first impressions.
Here, however, let me stop to answer an objection
that will be made to the arguments I have been trying
to present. "Assuming" — ■ so the objector will say — ■
" the value of ancient literature for historical purposes
to be all that you represent, cannot that value be
secured by reading the books in translations ? Why
take out of the few student years, already overcrowded
by the claims of other and more obviously necessary
studies, the time needed to master two languages
which are confessedly of little practical utility to-day.
Literature can be enjoyed in translations. The Ger-
mans who read Shakespeare in a translation appreciate
him quite as much as we do, in fact some of them think
he must have been a German. Goethe's criticisms
on his plays are the best that have ever been made.
We read and enjoy in English versions the Icelandic
Sagas, and Don Quixote, and many another great work.
The Bible itself formed the mind of mediaeval Europe
in a Latin version and thereafter formed the mind
of post-mediaeval Britain and America in an English

THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 335

version, and that version is admittedly equal in beauty
to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, and superior
to the Greek text of the New."

Our answer to this is that no translation gives, or
comes near giving, the effect which the ancient classics
produce when read in the original. The charm of
that form is incommunicable, for the magic of words
rests largely in their associations, and in what may be
called the sympathy of sense and sound. The delicate
fragrance of the ideas in their native form evaporates
in the attempt to pour thought from the vessel of one
language into that of another. This is especially true
of poetry, and more true of philosophy, in which so
much turns upon the use of precise terms, than it is of
history or of oratory. In stating and arguing about
facts, less depends upon the suggestive quality of the
words and upon their rhythm than when feeling as well
as reason is addressed, either in verse or in imaginative
prose. To estimate exactly how much is lost in trans-
lation is not easy, because whoever having read a great
book first in its original language reads it thereafter in
a translation is so struck by the loss as to undervalue
the latter : and it rarely happens that anyone who reads
such a book first in a translation afterwards reads it- in
the original. Many of you may have had with Dante
the experience which was mine, that little pleasure
can be derived from any translation — and less from
verse than from prose translations — and that the
splendour and power of the poet are not realized till he

336 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

is studied in the difficult Italian of his time. A trans-
lation, if fairly literal, is of course better than nothing.
But nobody can feel the true charm of the Greek
writers, nor of Virgil, nor perhaps even of Lucretius and
Catullus, except in the original. The original is the
only door through which we can enter into the hfe and
thought of the ancient world, near us because it is
simple, yet mysterious because it is remote.

The teachings of the ancients are precious, although
they come from afar, since we obtain from them a
picture of a sphere of thought and emotion unlike our
own, and therefore fitted to correct the narrowness
which rests content in its own modernity, and which
cannot feel after the future because it does not compre-
hend the variety of experiences that have moulded
man in the past.

It is in this sense of a long and rich past and in the
fuller and finer appreciation of poetic beauty which
ancient literature gives that its true worth lies, not in
grammar, not in quarries of etymological or philological
enquiry, not in any professional uses to which scholar-
ship can be turned. The practical use to be held out,
the fair guerdon to be won, is Enjoyment, a unique kind
of enjoyment. Sometimes one feels as if it were worth
while to learn Greek merely in order to appreciate the
melody and majesty of Homer. Think of such a
line as this,

Ovped T€ aKLoevTa daXacraa, re r)-)(7]ecrcra,^
^ Iliad, I, 157.

THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 337

or of the infinite pathos of the words which tell the death
of the youthful hero,

'^Os apa. [XLv eliTovra Te\o<; dauaTOLO KoiXvipe.
■^u^t) S' e/c pedioDV iTTafieurj "AtSdcrSe ^e/SyjKei,
"^Ov TTOTixov yooctxra, Xlttovct dvSpoTrJTa /cat "q/Brfv-^

Or remember that other famous passage which ends
with words that have fired the hearts and nerved
the arms of a hundred generations of patriots,

'Eis ol(ovo<; apLCTToq afiweadaL Trepl Trarpr/?.^

Is it not worth while to have in the background of
one's mind the vision of a far-off romantic world to
which we can turn back in thought and feel refreshed
as it refreshes us to descry, beyond the busy streets of
a city, the blue peak of a distant mountain range.

You will not suppose me to be arguing that these
studies, high as one may rate their value, are indispen-
sable to one who would attain the best kind of culture
or produce the best kind of literature. To genius
nothing is indispensable. What others can absorb by
training and study, the most gifted minds can achieve
by their innate power :

Pauci, quos sequus amavit
lupiter, aut ardens evexit ad aethera virtus,
Dis geniti, potuere.^

Some of our most brilliant writers, some of our
strongest thinkers, have had little in the way of literary

1 Hiad, XXII, 361. 2 niad, XII, 243. ^ ^neid, VI.

338 UNIVERSITY AND^ HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

education. Yet even they might have gained from it
something in fineness without losing anything in strength.
Neither do I venture to suggest that you can expect
any large number of young men to throw themselves
into studies that seem so remote from the pursuits of
practical life. Comparatively few will see any use in
what they call dead languages, or will feel any taste for
them. But some students you must have, and those
not professors only. You must see to it that business
is not the whole life of all American business men,
but that room is made in the lives of some few
of them for the enjoyments of ancient literature.
The few are worth regarding, for it is always by
the few best and most cultivated minds that tra-
ditions are preserved and taste is maintained at a high
level. They tend and keep alive the sacred flame.

May it not be expected that the strain and stress of
commercial and industrial life which now forces the
American youth to sacrifice everything else to fitting
himself for practical life, and leaves the American busi-
ness man scarce any leisure for intellectual pleasures,
will before long abate? A time will come when
the development of the country's resources will have
been completed and the opportunities for making huge
fortunes will have become less frequent. If you can
keep classical studies from further declining during the
next fifty years, your battle will have been won.

ON THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF
HISTORY

I

Commencement Address as Chancellor of Union College,
Schenectady, June, 1911.

I

ON THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF
HISTORY

Commencement Address as Chancellor of Union College,
Schenectady, June, 191 i.

Nowhere in the world is the study of history
pursued with more zeal and assiduity than in the
universities and colleges of the United States. There
must be many hundreds of professors and instructors
engaged in teaching it, and many others are occupied
in various branches of research work. It seems to be
that one among the so-called "humanistic" subjects
which attracts the largest number of students, a num-
ber probably much greater than that of those who are
occupied with Greek and Latin. The methods of
teaching it and writing it have, therefore, presented
themselves to me as a fitting topic on which to ad-
dress to you those remarks which you expect from one
whom you have honoured by choosing him to be your
Chancellor.

Eighty years ago there was no teaching of the subject
in American universities and practically none in
British. In Cambridge and in Oxford a professor was
allotted to it, but of these two one seldom lectured,
and the other not at all. In Scotland the universities

341

342 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

of St. Andrew's, Glasgow, and Aberdeen provided no
historical teaching, while at Edinburgh there was a
chair entitled that of Natural and Civil History, —
you may smile at the title, but there is a connection
between the two departments. Here in North
America the old established college curriculum had no
room for modern history and scarcely touched upon
ancient. Now, both in British and in American univer-
sities, the study has laid a strong hold upon the interest
of those who in growing numbers resort thither. Next
to that educational revolution which has given to the
sciences of nature their now predominant position in
the University curriculum, no change has been more
noteworthy. I may therefore safely assume that
many of you have followed with interest the course of
recent discussions as to how history should be taught
and written.

Before I come to this topic, let me offer one remark.
While admiring the untirmg energy and patient care
with which you teach American history and investi-
gate all its details, and while desiring to express the
gratitude of British scholars for what you have done
and are doing for the history of England, I venture to
submit that scarcely enough attention is given either
here or in Britain to the history of the European
Continent, and above aU to ecclesiastical histor}^,
which is in a certain sense the central stream of aU
intellectual and social movement, from the early days
of Christianity down to the eighteenth century, and

THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 343

which reveals to us the working of so many of the
chief forces that have not only affected politics, but
moulded character and conduct among Christian
nations. Asking you to consider at your leisure this
one suggestion, I pass on to a subject which has
doubtless already presented itself to your minds, for it
has been much discussed both here and in Europe.
It is this : What do we mean by the scientific treat-
ment of history ? And is history a science ?

In its most elementary forms, history began in some
countries, as in Egypt and among the Celtic peoples,
with genealogies of chiefs and kings; in others, as
among the Norsemen of Iceland, with tales of adven-
ture describing the feats of famous men; and again in
other countries, as in Europe during the Dark Ages,
with entries in the rolls of monasteries of any events
which appeared specially remarkable to the monk who
acted as scribe. The picture records of Mexico, and
the ballads in which the Pacific Islanders still recall
the exploits of warriors of former days, would have
been a basis for history had the art of writing been
known, just as the Song of Deborah was an historical
source for the early annals of Israel, and as the ballad
of Chevy Chase would have been a similar source
did we not possess more authentic records of the fight
at Otterburn. But historical composition, as a dis-
tinct branch of literature, begins with the Greeks, and
begins with two famous writers, contemporaries of the
great Athenian dramatists and of the greatest among

344 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

Greek lyric poets. Herodotus and Thucydides were
the models for the Roman historians from the second
century B.C. onwards, and have been models for the
civilized world ever since.

Different as these two masters were, so different that
they have been taken as representing two dissimilar
types of historical writing, they were alike in possessing
literary gifts of a high order. In their hands History
is fascinating as well as instructive. That character,
as a branch of what used to be called "polite letters,"
History recovered in the days of the Renaissance, and in
that character it was cultivated with special dihgence in
the eighteenth century both on the European continent
and in Britain. It was written not so much for the
sake of presenting an accurate record of what had
happened, as with a view to the pleasure or the moral
edification of the reader. AU possible pains were
taken to make it attractive in style. It was embel-
lished with rhetorical ornaments and, especially in the
hands of the less skilful artists, copiously interspersed
with moral reflections. For thirty years after the
outbreak of the French Revolution it was treated by
English writers in what might be called a homiletic
spirit, being used to warn men against the excesses of
democracy. Though we had in Britain no man who
could rank, in respect of learning and services he ren-
dered to learning, with the Italian Muratori, we had
great writers who added to the charms of a stately and
impressive style wide knowledge and vigorous thought.

THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 345

Such were Gibbon and Robertson, such, a generation
later, was Henry Hallam. These men, while they
never forgot that they were literary artists, felt
themselves to be also bound to the utmost care
in the collection and statement of their facts, and
devoted — one sees the growth of the tendency in
Hallam as compared with his predecessors — more
and more care to the study of original authorities.
Nevertheless the popular view that hterary skill rather
than special capacity or painstaking investigation was
the quality which the historian needed was illustrated
by the fact that so many of the most successful books
were written by men who were litterateurs rather than
historians. Hume, SmoUet, and Goldsmith, a meta-
physician, a novelist, and a dramatist, were the popu-
lar historians of their day. When, in the next genera-
tion, a history of Ireland was wanted for Lardner's
Cabinet Cyclopaedia, it was committed to Tom Moore,
the Irish poet, who brought patriotism and imagi-
nation and style, but little else, to a singularly difficult
task. So even in Germany, Schiller, withdrawn from
the service of poetry, wrote the history of the Thirty
Years' War. The tradition that the historian must be
eloquent lasted on for another half century. George
Bancroft and even Motley marred the effect of their
books by needless rhetoric. The thoroughness and
ingenuity with which E. A. Freeman worked out the
details of his Norman Conquest and his History of Sicily
would have been more fully appreciated but for his

346 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

tendency to grandiloquence. The case of J. A. Froude,
the last of the so-called literary historians, is not quite
the same. The others whom I have just named were
solid, hard-working, conscientious scholars ; Froude
was a brilliant stylist, who had begun his career as a
writer of stories, and chose thereafter to display in the
field of history his gift of picturesque narration. His
ecclesiastical partisanship was usually evident enough
to enable a reader to discount it. A graver fault was
that superb indifference to truth which sometimes led
him to regard the facts he had to deal with chiefly as
so much material to be handled with a view to artistic
effect, putting on them such colouring as was needed
to secure the particular effect desired, and caring little
for accuracy in details which did not move his
curiosity.

A new spirit, however, had already been at work in
France and Germany, and in the first quarter of the nine-
teenth century it had begun to show itself in Great Brit-
ain also. The same intellectual movement which had
been producing discoveries in the field of physics and
chemistry, and was soon to produce discoveries in those
of geology and biology, revealed itself in the students of
philology, economics, and history. The half century
which covers Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley
and Saussure and Cuvier and Humboldt covers also
the publication of F. A. Wolf's famous Prolegomena to
Homer, a period in which new critical methods began
to be applied by other scholars, as by Michaelis, to the

THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 347

primitive literature and early records of other peoples
also. Even earlier they had been applied by Beaufort
to Roman history. Niebuhr in Germany and Guizot
in France were in the nineteenth century among the
first leaders of a new school who showed that they cared
more for the substance than for the form of their his-
torical writing, though both of them had the force and
finish which belong to powerful minds, Niebuhr bold
and briUiant in his suggestions, Guizot, lucid, acute,
and delicate in his handling of details. The men of
this school flung themselves into the investigation
of the sources of history with an ardour and assiduity
which in earlier days had been sometimes displayed
by patient and leisurely workers like the Benedictines
in France or the Magdeburg Centuriators in Germany,
but seldom by persons in the front rank either of
teachers or of writers known to the world at large.
Strict critical methods now began to be generally
applied to the original contemporaneous authorities.
Public and private archives and collections of books
or documents were ransacked for new materials.
Manuscripts were collated, edited, published in
such a series as that of the Recueil des Historiens
in France or that of the Monumenta HistoricB
Germanica in Germany. All the old views were
reexamined; many old fables or misconceptions were
exploded. For the loose phrases and flowing periods
of the school of "literary historians" there was sub-
stituted an exact and precise setting forth of what

348 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

could be ascertained from the sources, showing how
much was certain, how much doubtful, and how far
different sources agreed with or contradicted one
another. In the earlier stages of the movement the
more daring spirits attempted to reconstruct the more
distant and darker periods of history from data which we
should now think too slender, and the tendency during
the last thirty years has been to discourage efforts to
rewrite the annals of a people in the light of any theory,
however plausible, and to be content Avith setting out
all that can be known, leaving the student to make the
best of it. Ranke and Mommsen are, in respect of
their immense productive power and massive learning,
the most illustrious representatives of this school, but
in our language, we may point to William Stubbs, to
E. A. Freeman, to Francis Parkman, to Samuel R.
Gardiner, and to F. W. Maitland as instances of the
way in which scholars writing in English have
absorbed and exemplified its methods.

It is sometimes said that this change in the way of
handling history is due to the influence of the sciences
of nature upon the minds of all classes of educated
men. Doubtless the rapid advance of those sciences
through the application of their exact experimental
methods has helped to strengthen among all kinds of
investigators a sense of the importance of precision,
accuracy, and caution in inference. Nevertheless it
will be seen, if the progress of the humanistic studies is
carefully examined, that the new tendencies which have

THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 349

come to pervade the latter are not a result of the ad-
vance of the physical sciences, but rather part of a
parallel and independent though cognate change in the
intellectual tendencies and habits of mankind. The
beginning of a critical examination of ancient docu-
ments may be found in Spinoza, who was a con-
temporary of the group of Englishmen that founded
the Royal Society. The employment of exact methods
in historical investigation was visible in modern
Europe almost as soon as was the adoption of
experimental methods in physical science. Nor was
this critically exact spirit a wholly new thing. One
sees it emerging from time to time in superior minds
as far back as Thucydides and Aristotle.

Not only in Germany, France, and Italy, but also in
Britain and the United States the best men had been
writing history in a genuinely scientific way before
the term "scientific history" began to be used as a
technical expression somewhere about the year 1880.
If that term be taken to denote the systematic
application of strict tests to evidence and a single-
minded devotion to the ascertainment and the state-
ment of truth, and nothing but the truth, then all
will agree that it is an entirely laudable ideal, and that
whoever gives us a history which is scientific in this
sense, whatever else he gives or fails to give, renders a
real service.

The term seems, however, to be taken as connoting
some negative as well as some positive quahties. The

350 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

"scientific" historian must, it seems to be supposed,
renounce all literary graces and aim at dryness. His
style is to be plain and bald. Not only ornament,
but anything which can rouse emotion or appeal to
imagination is to be eschewed, for that way danger lies.
Romantic incidents and dramatic scenes are to be
excluded, or told in a business-like or even prosaic
way, lest the reader be diverted from the succession of
more important events; nor are any moral judgments
to be pronounced.

Our distinguished English authority, the late Pro-
fessor Seeley, himself a writer of singular force, \^^th
a power of making his points tell which the most
accomplished forensic advocate might have envied, went
so far as to declare that in order to be scientifically
valuable, history must be duU or dry.

Considered as a reaction against the habit of treat-
ing history as a part of poHte letters, against the
superabundant rhetoric of Bancroft and the pic-
turesque carelessness of Froude, this \dew was a legiti-
mate reaction. It suited the practical and business-like
spirit of our time, and has been generally accepted by
the present generation. The truth of the facts is no
doubt far more important than any of the embellish-
ments which literary skill can add to a narrative, and
if the embellishments begin to be seductive, cast them
away. Excellent opportunities for working on these
lines were afforded by such large cooperative under-
takings as the Dictionary of National Biography

THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 351

and the Cambridge Modern History, for as in these
compression was of the first importance, ornament was
very properly discarded. I remember how at a public
dinner given to celebrate the completion of the former
book, one speaker, deservedly popular among the
literary figures of London, delighted the audience by
observing that the maxim of the editors of that
stupendous work had been, "No flowers, by request."

The precept that style need not be regarded has the
advantage of being easy to follow, easier than most of
the counsels of asceticism. If the road into the
gardens of historic truth leads through the realm of
dulness, all may traverse the first part of it. We can
all of us be heavy, or slipshod, or merely level and
monotonous. And doubtless it is better to be tedious
and monotonous and dreary almost up to the verge
of unreadability than that our facts should be wrong
or that such of them as are right should be smothered
under festoons of florid verbiage. A somewhat tedious
history like Guicciardini's, or a level and rather arid one
like Lingard's, is serviceable in spite of its tameness.
But aridity raises no presumption of accuracy. There
is no necessary or natural connection between the two
things, and accuracy may be just as weU combined
with animation. The things that have actually hap-
pened are as interesting as the things that might have
happened, but did not, just as picturesque, just as well
fitted to touch imagination and appeal to sentiment.
That some writers have, in their desire to produce

352 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

literary effect, forgotten that their first devotion was
due to truth, is a reason not for despising Hterary
effect, but for relegating it to the second place.

There are instances enough more recent than those
of Gibbon and Robertson, already noted, not to speak
of Thomas Carlyle, to show that there is no incom-
patibility between scientific and literary treatment.
Macaulay's amazing force and brilliance have draT\Ti,
and continue to draw, thousands of people to his pages
who would have been attracted by no one with a
less fascinating style. But though his eminence and
pronounced political views exposed him in his hfetime
to a captiously minute and rather niggling criticism,
his work has, take it all in all, stood the test of
time as an authority. Lord Acton, one of the most
accurate as well as the most learned of recent English
historians, though sometimes obscure from the very
pregnancy of his thought, lit up his narrative wdth
epigrammatic wisdom, and, more rarely, with descrip-
tions of concentrated glow. The style of Henry C.
Lea, the most learned as well as among the most
accurate of recent American historical writers, though
no doubt always plain and level, is always agreeable,
because he knew how to select from the vast material
at his command what was most illuminative. He has
always something interesting to tell, and he tells it
with lucid simplicity. Francis Parkman's laborious
researches did not wither the freshness of his mind.
John Richard Green, though sometimes heedless in

THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 353

small things, was in essential matters a sound and
trustworthy writer, against whom few serious errors
have ever been proved, yet his Short History
of England is confessedly as fascinating as any
novel.

Thucydides himself, the greatest of them all, the
model of exactness and thoroughness in his treatment
of the events of his time, Thucydides has given us
narrative passages like that describing the retreat of
the Athenian army from Syracuse, where every sentence
is charged with dramatic force, and reflective passages
which stir the depths of thought now as they did
twenty-four centuries ago. There is no ornament in
his writing, but there is not a dull page.

May not our friends of the neo-scientiiic school — those
whom Walter Scott and after him Carlyle would have
called the Dryasdusts — sometimes forget that history
has to be written not only for historical students who
bring their interest with them, so that the dry bones
are all they need, but also for those who bring no
such special interest, and who will be repelled by an
unattractive treatment of the theme ? That a knowl-
edge of the past should be more generally diffused
through the whole community, that the past should be
made to live as something real in their minds, that it
should help to form their tastes and enlarge their
horizons, is an object worth working for. Anything
can be made dull or lively by the way in which it is |

told, and history more easily than most subjects,

354 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

because there are no difficulties of technical termi-
nology to overcome.

When we pronounce a book of history dull, why
do we find it so ? Is it not because the leading
characters are not individualized, because the salient
facts are not brought into due relief, because the dra-
matic situations are missed, because the style does
not rise or fall in sympathy with the significance of the
events and their emotions they evoke ? The avoidance
of these defects, so far from injuring the truth and
precision of a record, will make it more vivid and more
readily remembered by the special student as well
as the lay reader.

Another school has arisen of late years which also
claims the name of Scientific, and its pretensions
have made so much noise both in Europe and here
as to require some consideration. This school seeks
to raise, or reduce, history to the level of an exact
science like those which deal with various departments
of physical enquiry. Conceiving that only through at-
taining an exactitude like theirs can history have any
real value, it ignores the individual, it regards the course
of human affairs as determined by general laws which
govern the action of men associated in communities,
much as the so-called "laws of nature" govern the in-
animate and animate external world. From a study of
racial characteristics, intellectual tendencies, and the
play of economic interests, this school believes itself able
to discover such laws, and it expounds them in elaborate

THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 355

formulae, purporting to sum up the past, to explain the
present, to predict (perhaps less positively) the future.
The objection to this method and procedure as we
see it practised by the votaries of this school is that it
is not scientific. Nothing accords less with scientific
principles than to treat as similar things essentially
dissimilar. Now the phenomena of human society
which history deals with are altogether unlike the
phenomena of external nature, indeed, so unlike as to
suggest that the methods fit for the one can hardly be
fit for the other, or at any rate cannot promise like
results. Oxygen and hydrogen behave in the same
way in all countries. Their properties were, so far as
we know, the same ten thousand years ago as they are
now, and are apparently the same here on our earth
as they are in the sun and the other stars. But the
features of human society are wholly different in
different races and different countries. Even in the
same countries they were a thousand years ago unlike
what they are now. Their study is for this and other
(reasons incomparably more difficult than is the study
■ of natural phenomena. No scrutiny we can apply to
them can possibly be exhaustive, nor can those
methods of counting, measuring and weighing by which
^exactitude is secured in chemistry and physics be
'employed. Most observers are prone, since they
cannot possibly exhaust the facts, to fix their atten-
tion on, and give prominence to, those facts which
[happen to fit in with their preconceived notions, and

356 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

use them to support the broad generalizations they
seek to draw. Many a man, when he has gone a
Httle way into a subject, thinks it easy to sum up in a
generalization the facts he sees. No habit is more
seductive. But it is a dangerous habit, because ample
knowledge and an experience that engenders caution
are needed to recognize the pitfalls that he round the
enquirer's path. So one may say that the longer a
man studies either a given country or a given period, the
fewer, the more cautious, and the more carefully limited
and guarded in statement will his generalizations be.
Some fifty years ago the late Mr. H. T. Buckle
published a book entitled a History of Civilization.
Its vigorous style and bold generalizations gave it
popularity at the time. But though Buckle had read
widely and done a good deal of thinking, his knowledge
was altogether insufficient to qualify him for the task
he was attempting, and he had not been trained to
apply adequate criticism to the authorities he
used. There were in the book some true things
forcibly stated and fitted to stimulate reflection, but
it made no really important contribution to knowl-
edge ; and some of his generalizations, as for instance
the well-known parallel between Scotland and Spain,
were ludicrous. Of most of the other writers who
have followed in the same path much the same may
be said. The foundations have been weak, so the
structures of ambitious theory raised upon them have
been flimsy and unstable. These writers have seldom

THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 357

realized the extreme complexity of the data to be
dealt with, the number of the hidden forces at work,
the variability of human beings under different condi-
tions, the important part played by individual men
whose appearance has disturbed all calculations and
overthrown all predictions.

Suppose that a philosopher had in the middle of the
second century of our era addressed himself to the task
of writing a history of civilization and moral progress.
He would have had nearly nine centuries of tolerably
authentic history behind him, a period as long as that
which separates us from Pope Gregory the Seventh
and William the Conqueror, and he might have pleased
himself by drawing out and dedicating to the Em-
peror Marcus Aurelius, as a monarch of philosophic
tastes, a generalized statement of the laws governing
human development which, being proved from an
observation of the past, would evidently continue to
determine human progress in the centuries to come.
The materials might have seemed abundant, and the
interpretation of the causes of progress a simple
matter. But our philosopher would have left out of
account the two factors which 'were destined to have
most influence on that progress, — Christianity, which
the Emperor was trying to repress as a dangerous
secret society, and the barbarian foes of civilization
with whom he was warring on the Danube.

The more recent writers of this school — its Cory-
phaeus was the late Mr. Herbert Spencer, but it has

358 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

representatives in Continental Europe also — have
not (so far as I know) contributed to history either
any sound theories, or any illuminative suggestions
which competent historians did not know already,
and did not know better, because they were known
as the result of a wide and critical mastery of
details. What the school has given is a mass of general
propositions couched in what sounds like scientific
language, but the contents and substance of which are
either threadbare truths so dressed up in solemn
phraseology as to appear to be novelties, or theories
too vague and abstract to be serviceable either as
interpretations or as summaries of the facts. Some-
times the propositions are not true as stated, i.e. they
contain a germ of truth, but are misleading unless
many qualifications be added. This faith in phrases
and formulae is an instance of that recurring pro-
pensity of the human mind to impose upon facts in
general its own notions drawn from a few facts
hastily gathered, — notions which gain authority from
being clothed in elaborate pseudo-technical termi-
nology. It was a like propensity which in the Middle
Ages retarded the progress of the sciences of nature
by embodying crude conceptions of phenomena in
terms and theories to which there was nothing cor-
responding in reality, as when men talked about
"phlogiston" and "animal spirits" and thought they
had explained things by saying that "nature abhors
a vacuum."

THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 359

Mr. Spencer was a most painstaking and earnest
thinker, and the efforts of his school to impress
upon their contemporaries the value of an arrange-
ment and synthesis of knowledge deserve all recogni-
tion. Of what services the school has rendered to
subjects other than history I wUl not venture to
speak, but as respects the results attained in history
and subjects cognate thereto, the view I have tried to
convey to you is, I believe, that pretty generally held
by historical students both here and in England.
Perhaps the disappointment one feels in perusing
books where one seeks for bread and seems to receive
only stones may perhaps bias those of us who were
trained in another school. Judge therefore for your-
selves and see if you can extract new and profit-
able truths where we have not been able to discover
them.

Needless to say that every historical scholar
recognizes that there are certain general principles
to be applied to the investigation of human society
and to the elucidation of the forces by which the
institutions and arts of life have advanced, and
reognizes also that though the movement which
has made history more scientific had an independent
origin, the historian may profit by a knowledge of the
methods employed in the sciences of nature. In the
first place there is to be studied Human Nature itself,
which presents certain fundamental qualities and habits
present in all more or less civilized communities, quali-

360 UNIVERSITY AND fflSTORICAL ADDRESSES

ties whose existence we may everywhere assume as social
factors. These factors are in their outlines familiar
to us all. They have been dwelt upon by philosophers
and historians from Plato downwards. They do
furnish a basis for what may be called a general treat-
ment of political and social institutions, but it is only
a basis, because the phenomena differ so much accord-
ing to race and environment that the general propo-
sitions we can lay down as positive and practically
certain are but few.

Secondly, there are certain general tendencies which
can be traced through the annals of mankind, certain
lines along which human progress has moved. To dis-
cover and trace and illustrate these is the province of
what is usually called the Philosophy of History, a
subject with which some famous writers have dealt,
beginning with the Arab Ibn Khaldun, and coming
down through the Italian Vico to the German Hegel.
There is no branch of historical enquiry that better
deserves your thoughts. But it is more modest in its
pretensions than is the school of Buckle and Spencer,
for it does not attempt to lay down general proposi-
tions about all men and all communities, but only to
explain the past by showing what were the most
potent forces and tendencies at work, and how the
growth of the human mind expressed itself in the
moulding and perfecting of institutions.

The facts which History presents chronologically
may also be treated as materials for a systematic

THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 361

study of any special branch of human activity, just as
the events in the annals of the Greeks recorded by
Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and others may be
used for a treatise, like that of Aristotle, concerning
Greek politics. History may hand over the phenom-
ena she records to be made the basis of books on
political science, or economic science, or what is called
Sociology, in which the phenomena are arranged and
analyzed, and are so correlated and explained as to
enable us to draw from them general conclusions.
But the materials belong to History. It is she that
has gathered them. It is to her that he who would
handle them systematically must go in order to know
the authenticity and the value of each part of them.

Let me try to sum up as follows what I have sought
to convey to you.

There is no incompatibility between the scientific
treatment and the literary treatment of history. Un-
due attention to the latter wiU tend to make a writer
less accurate and thorough in investigation, just as
complete absorption in the investigation of facts will
tend to make his presentation of the facts less attrac-
tive. But there is nothing to-day, any more than in
bygone days, to prevent him from being both a careful
investigator and an agreeable writer. As between
Lingard and Froude, choose Lingard, but the combina-
tion of qualities which you have in Macaulay or
Green or Parkman or Lea is better than either. No
historians were more accurate and exact than Ranke

L

362 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

and Mommsen, but every page in the writings of both
has a literary quality.

There is no incompatibihty between the use of
critical methods and a careful study of details on the
one hand and a grasp of broad general principles on
the other. Rather is it true that the man who knows
the details best is also the fittest to educe and explain
the general principles. Many a student can master the
details who cannot expound the principles, but the
man of wide grasp is always the better for knowing
the details also, for in them lies Reality.

That which is misleading and unfruitful is the ten-
dency to disjoin the mastery of details from the so-
called " sociological " study of general principles, i.e. to
think you can have the latter without the former.
To re-create any period of the Past for our o\\ti minds,
to understand it as it was, unlike what went before it,
unlike what came after it, — this is the chief aim of
history, and for this purpose one must study not only
the masses of men but also individual men, their ideas
and beliefs, their enjoyments and aspirations. Espe-
cially important is it for any one who would explain
the course of events that he should understand those
individuals who by force of thought or will dominated
their own time and turned the course of events. Not
only has the study of striking figures the greatest
fascination for the ordinary reader as well as the
student, it has also an importance for the compre-
hension of events which the Buckle and Spencer

THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 363

school do not seem to realize. The individual doubt-
less counts for less to-day in most countries than he
did in either the republics or the monarchies of the
past. But if you wish to realize how much he still
counts for, think of how different Europe would have
been to-day had there been no Napoleon Bonaparte,
no Mazzini, no Cavour, no Bismarck ; or what it
would have meant in your Revolutionary War if
Clive, who died in 1774, had lived to lead the troops of
George the Third and there had been no Washington
to oppose him, or how different the course of events
in the Civil War if Seward instead of Lincoln had been
nominated at Chicago for the Presidency.

The writer or teacher of history begins by a
critical investigation of the facts. This is science, and
one of the most difficult branches of science. When
you have ascertained the facts so far as ascertainable,
try to connect them and arrange them in the order
of their importance and educe general conclusions
from them. This also is science. Then set them forth
in the best order and the best words you can find.
This is literature. Literary skUl crowns the work, and
makes it more useful because it makes the work
spread farther, and better accomplish its end. But it
is worthless if the two other processes have not gone
before.

For the highest kind of historical work four gifts
are needed; unwearied diligence in investigation, a
penetrating judgment which can fasten on the more

364 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

essential points, an imagination which can vivify the
past, and that power over language which we call
Style. So the greatest historians have been those who
combined a wide sweep of vision with a thorough
mastery of details, and who have known how to set
forth both the details and the principles in a way
which makes them enrich the reader's thought, touch
his emotions, and live in his memory.

SOME HINTS ON READING

Address to the Students of Rutgers (formerly Queen's)
College, New Jersey, October, 191 i.

SOME HINTS ON READING

Address to the Students of Rutgers (formerly Queen's)
College, New Jersey, October, 191 i.

It has been often said that books do for us to-day
what universities did in earher ages. The knowledge
that could five centuries ago have been obtained only
from the lips of a teacher, can now be gathered from the
printed page. Nevertheless, since it is only the most
active and most diligent and most discerning minds
that can dispense with the help and guidance of teachers
to show them what to read and how to read, univer-
sities and colleges are scarcely less useful if not quite
so indispensable to-day as they were before the inven-
tion of printing. It is, therefore, not unfitting that in
your coUege I should be asked to talk to you about
books, the way to choose them, and the way to draw
most profit from them. The very abundance of books
in our days — a stupefying and terrifying abundance —
has made it more important to know how to choose
promptly and judiciously among them if one is not to
spend as much time in the mere choice as in the use.
Here you have the help of your professors. But here
you are only beginning the process of education which
will go on during the rest of your life. By far the

367

368 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

largest part of that process will, after you have left
college, consist in your independent reading, so the
sooner you form habits of choice and methods of use,
the better.

The first piece of advice I will venture to give you
is this : Read only the best books. There are
plenty of them, far more than you will ever find time
to read, and when they are to be had it is a pity to
waste time on any others.

You may ask what I mean by the Best books.
Passing by for the moment those which in each of
the great world-languages we call its classics, for to
these we shall return presently, I mean by the Best
those from which you receive most, and can carry
most away, in the form either of knowledge or of
stimulation. When you want to learn something
about a subject, do not fall upon the first book
which you have heard named or which professes
by its title to deal with that subject. Consult your
teacher, or any well-read friend, or the librarian of
the nearest public library. (One of the greatest ser\dces
public libraries render is that they provide librarians
usually competent, and I believe always ^^dlling, to
advise those who apply to them.) Be content \^'ith
nothing less than the very best you can get. Time
will be saved in the end.

There is no waste more pitiable than that so often
seen when some zealous student has, for want of
guidance, spent weeks or months of toil in tr}dng to

SOME HINTS ON READING 369

obtain from a second- or third-rate book what he
might have found sooner and better in a first-rate one.
So try to read only what is good. And by "good"
you will not suppose me to mean what used to be
called "improving books," books written in a sort of
Sunday School spirit for the moral benefit of the
reader. A book may be excellent in its ethical tone,
and full of solid information, and yet be unprofitable,
that is to say, dull, heavy, uninspiring, wearisome.
Contrariwise, a book is good when it is bright and
fresh, when it rouses and enlivens the mind, when
it provides materials on which the mind can pleasur-
ably work, when it leaves the reader not only knowing
more but better able to use the knowledge he has
received from it.

Seventy years ago people, or at least those who used
then to be called the preceptors of youth, talked as if there
lay a certain virtue in dry books, or at any rate a moral
merit in the process of plodding through them. It
was a dismal mistake, which inflicted upon youth many
a dreary hour. The dull book is not better than the
lively book. Other things being equal, it is worse, be-
cause it requires more expenditure of effort to master
such of its contents as are worth remembering. If the
edge of the tool is blunt, one must put forth more
strength, and as there is never too much strength, none
of it should be wasted. It may be asked, "But is not
the mental discipline wholesome ? " Yes, effort crowned
with victory is a fine thing, but since there is plenty of

370 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

such discipline to be had from the better books why go
to the worse books for it ?

Sometimes it happens that what you want to learn can-
not be had except from dry or even from dull treatises.
Dryness and dulness are not the same thing, for the
former quality may be due to the nature of the subject,
but the latter is the fault of the author. Well, if there
is no other book to be found, you must make the best
of the dry and even of the dull. But first make quite
sure that there are none better to be had, for though in
many a subject the really satisfactory book has not yet
been written, still in most subjects there is a large choice
between the better and the worse.

Every book ought to be so composed as to be capable
of being read with enjoyment by those who bring
interest and capacity to it. One cannot be pla}'iully
various and graphically picturesque upon every kind
of subject. Once, in a distant British colony, a friend
of mine was asked by a person who knew that he came
from the University of Oxford, "What do you think of
Euclid?" My friend replied that Euclid's "Elements
of Geometry" — if that was what the question referred
to — was a valuable treatise, whose reputation had
been established for many centuries. "Yes," said the
questioner, "but what do you think of Euclid's style?"
My friend answered that he had always thought more
about the substance than about the style of Euclid,
but would be glad to know his questioner's opinion.
"Well," said the latter, "I consider it quite a good

SOME HINTS ON READING 371

style, but too systematic." Eloquence, variety, and wit
are not the particular merits we look for in a scientific
treatise, but however dry geometry or any other
subject may appear, there is all the difference between
a book which is well arranged and well expressed, a
book which takes a grip of the mind and affords the
pleasure of following out a line of logical thought,
and a book which tumbles out facts and ideas in a
confused and shapeless heap.

To you undergraduates life now seems a long vista
with infinite possibilities. But, if you love learning,
you will soon find that life is altogether too short for
reading half the good books from which you would
like to cull knowledge. Let not an hour of it be
wasted on third-rate or second-rate stuff if first-rate
stuff can be had. Goethe once said of some one he
knew, " He is a dull man. If he were a book, I
would not read him." When you find that a book is
poor, and does not give you even the bare facts you
are in search of, waste no more time upon it.

The immensity of the field of reading suggests
another question. Ought a man to read widely, trying
to keep abreast of the progress of knowledge and
thought in the world at large, or is it better that he
should confine himself to a very few subjects, and to
proceed not discursively but upon some regular
system ?

Each alternative has its advantages, but considering
how rapidly knowledge is extending itself in all direc-

372 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

tions, and how every branch of it is becoming special-
ized, we must recognize that the range of attainment
possible three or even two centuries ago is now un-
attainable even by the most powerful and most
industrious minds. To-day the choice Hes between su-
perficiality in a larger, and some approach to thorough-
ness in a smaller, number of topics. Between these
alternatives there can be no doubt as to your choice.
Every man ought to be thorough in at least one thing,
ought to know what exactness and accuracy mean,
ought to be capable by his mastery of some one topic
of having an opinion that is genuinely his own. So
my advice to you would be to direct your reading
chiefly to a few subjects, in one at least of which
you may hope to make yourself proficient, and as re-
gards other subjects, to be content with doing what
you can to follow the general march of knowledge.
You will find it hard — ■ indeed impossible — to
follow that march in the physical sciences, unless you
start with some special knowledge of one or more of
them. Many of the branches into which they ha^•e
been diverging are now so specialized that the ordinary
reader can hardly comprehend the technical terms which
modern treatises employ. But as respects travel and
history and biography, and similarly as respects econom-
ics, the so-called "sociological subjects," art, and lit-
erary criticism, it is possible for a man who husbands his
time and spends little of it on newspapers or magazines,
to find leisure for the really striking books that are

SOME HINTS ON READING 373

published on some of these topics which lie outside
his special tastes. Do not, however, attempt to cover
even the striking books on all of such topics. You
will only dissipate your forces. Now and then a book
appears which everybody ought to read, no matter
how far it lies out of his range of study. It may be
a brilliant poem. It may be a treatise throwing new
light on some current question of home or foreign
politics, about which every citizen, because he is a
citizen, ought to try to have an opinion. It may be
the record of some startling discovery in the realms of
archaeology, for instance, or in some branch of natural
science. But such books are rare ; and in particular
the epoch-making scientific discoveries are seldom
known at the time when the world first hears of them
to be really epoch-making.

Two questions may, however, have presented them-
selves to you One is this : Are there not some indis-
pensable books which everyone is bound to read on
pain of being deemed to be not an educated man ?
Certainly there are. Every language has its classics
which those who speak the language ought to have
read as part of a liberal education. In our own tongue
we have, say, a score of great authors — it would be
easy to add another dozen, but I wish to be moderate
and put the number as low as possible — of whose works
every one of us is bound to have read enough to enable
him to appreciate the author's peculiar quality.
These of course you must read, though not necessarily

374 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

all or nearly all they have written. Spenser, for
instance, is an English classic, but even so voracious
a reader as Macaulay admitted that few could be
expected to persevere to the end of the "FsLery
Queene." Even smaller is the percentage of Dryden's
works which a man may feel bound to read. Do not
look for an opinion as to the percentage in the case of
Robert Browning. The sooner you begin to read
those who belong to this score, the better, for most of
them are poets, and youth is the season in which to
learn to love poetry. If you do not care for it then,
you will hardly do so later.

The other question is, What about fiction ? I can
just recall an austere time, more than sixty years ago,
when in Britain not a few moralists and educators
were disposed to ban novel-reading altogether to
young people and to treat it even among their elders
as an indulgence almost as dangerous as the use of
cards, dice, and tobacco. Exceptions, however, were
made even by the sternest of these authorities.
I recollect that one of them gave his imprimatur to
two stories by an estimable Scottish authoress — -now
long forgotten — named Miss Brunton. These tales
were entitled " DiscipHne " and " Self -Control," and a
perusal of them was well fitted to discourage the
young reader from indulging any further his taste for
imaginative literature. Permitted fiction being scanty,
I did attack " Self-Control," and just got through it,
but " Discipline " was too much for me. Fiction is

SOME HINTS ON READING 375

far more read now; being abundant and cheaper,
since it comes in the form of magazines as well as
in books. But we have no Dickens, no Thackeray, no
Hawthorne, no George Eliot.

. Need anything more be said about fiction than that
we should deal with it just as we should with other
kinds of literature ? Read the best ; that is to say,
read that from which you can carry away something
that enlarges the range of your knowledge and sets
your mind working. A good story, be it a historical
romance or a picture of contemporary social condi-
tions, gives something that is worth remembering. It
may be a striking type of character, or a view of life
and the influences that mould life, presented in a
dramatic form. Or perhaps the tale portrays the
aspects of society and manners in some other country,
or is made a vehicle for an analysis of the heart and
for reflections that illuminate some of the dark corners
of human nature. Whichever of them it be that a
powerful piece of fiction gives, the result is something
more than mere transient amusement. Knowledge is
increased. Thought is set in motion. New images
rise before us. It is an enrichment of the mind to
have erected within it a gallery of characters, the
creation of imaginative minds, characters who be-
come as real to us as the famous characters of history,
to some of us possibly more real. In them we see the
universal traits of human nature and learn to know our-
selves and those around us better, we comprehend the

376 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

common temptations and aspirations, the mixture of
motives, the way in which Fortune plays with men.
We share the possession of this gallery with other
educated men. It is a part of the common stock of
the world's wealth.

The danger of becoming so fond of fiction as to care
for no other sort of reading, a malady from which some
men and more women are said to suffer, will threaten
nobody who has formed the habit of reading the kind
of fiction I am trying to describe, because he will enjoy
no other kind. A boy or girl can usually read any
sort of tale be it better or worse written. The stor>^
is enough for him. As he grows older and has read
more and more of the best writers, his taste becomes
more cultivated and exacting. While faults repel him
more, merits attract him more, because he has become
more capable of appreciation. At last a poor quality
of fiction which is merely commonplace, handling
threadbare themes in a hackneyed way, the sort of
fiction into which no inventive or reflective thought
has gone, comes to bore him. He can no longer read
it, because it is too dull or too vapid.

Prose fiction, in its higher forms, cultivates the
imagination almost as well as history does, but poetry
does this better than either. The pleasures of the
imagination are among the highest we can enjoy.
Unless, therefore, any one of you is so unlucky as to
find no delight in poetry, it will always form a part of
your reading. Not much of the highest order has

SOME HINTS ON READING 377

been appearing in these later days in any country,
but there is such an abundance from former days
that you will never want for plenty to read and no
modern language possesses so much poetry of first-
rate merit as does our own.

It seems a pity that the old practice of learning a
good deal of poetry by heart should be now falling into
disuse, for it stored the mind in the early years of life
with fine thoughts in fine words and helped to form a
taste for style, seeing that style can rise to greater
heights of perfection in poetry than in any kind of
prose. As to what to read in poetry, there is no need
in our day to warn any one against reading too much,
and there is little to say about choice, for you will
naturally be drawn first to the great and famous
classics in our own and other tongues, and they will so
form your taste that you will know how to choose
among other verse writers. In particular do not omit
those few great writers who have attained to a distinc-
tive way of looking at the world as a whole (what the
Germans call a Weltanschaung), those in whose minds
and works human nature in all its varieties, human
life in all its aspects, is mirrored. The author, or authors,
of the Homeric poems is the earliest example: Goethe
is one of the latest, and not all are poets, for Cervantes
is among them.

A man who does not care for those whom the judg-
ment of the world has approved, may conclude that
the fault is with himself. But it is not always the

378 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

greatest writers that give the most pleasure. Most of
us have some two or three poets not classed in the
first rank, perhaps writers whose fame has always been
limited, to whom we frequently return because they
express thoughts in a way which makes a special appeal
to our own minds. Look out for these also, and
cherish them when you have found them.

Though divers wise and learned men have drawn
up lists of what they describe as the Best Hundred
Books, it may be doubted whether such Usts have
any use beyond that of indicating the preferences
of their eminent compilers and the use also of re-
calling to the notice of the modem public some
remarkable works which it had nearly forgotten. The
truth is that the excellence of a book is not absolute,
i.e. the same for all readers alike, but rather is
relative to the knowledge and capacities and environ-
ment of the particular reader. Many a book of first-
rate value to a person prepared by education and spe-
cial talents to appreciate it is useless to others not
so prepared. A more really interesting enquir}^ is.
What are the books that have made most difference to
the progress of the world? Such books are a part, and a
significant part, of world-history, yet some of them
would interest comparatively few readers to-day.

The question of how much time should be devoted
to the classics of other countries than our own is too
large a one for me to enter on. Enough to say that
whoever knows Latin or Greek or Italian or French or

SOME HINTS ON READING 379

German or Spanish or Icelandic, will not need to be
told that he ought to be just as anxious to know the
masterpieces in those languages as those in his own.
The ancient classics in particular give something which
no modem literature supplies.

From considering What to read, let us go on to con-
sider How to read. Here my advice to you would be,
Read with a purpose. Bend your mind upon the book.
Read it so as to get out of it the best it has to give you.
You may accept this advice as applicable to what is
read for information, but may think it superfluous if
the book is a story or other work read for amusement,
because presumably no one will persevere with such a
book unless it interests him. Yet even where the aim
is amusement and the book a work of fiction one man
may, if he read it in the right way, extract more
benefit as well as more pleasure than another would
do. If the story is worth reading, it is so because it
not only appeals to our curiosity, but also because it
pleasurably stirs our thought.

With other kinds of literature, with science or
philosophy or history or economics, the worth of
the book is to be measured by what you can
carry away from it, and that depends mainly on
the spirit in which you read. The book, as already
observed, must have quality enough to stimulate
thought, to give you what is called a mental reaction.
But however good the quality, the reaction will not
foUow unless you address your mind to the subject.

380 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

The purpose must be either to get something — whether
facts or ideas — which you can add to your store of
knowledge or else to receive a stimulus which will
quicken your own powers of thinking and feeling.
These two benefits usually go together. It is not the
quantity of reading that counts, but the quantity and
the intensity of thought that are evoked. Nothing is
gained by skimming over hundreds or thousands of
pages of print unless something remains from the
process. So if after having honestly applied your
intellect to a book you do not find anything you care
to carry away, drop it. Either it is not worth further
effort, or it maybe outside the range of your appreciation.

You will not, however, fancy that all the books you
may have to consult deserve careful study. If
thoroughness is a virtue to be cultivated, stiU more is
time a thing to be saved. The old maxim, "Whatever
is worth doing is worth doing well," is less true than it
seems, and has led many people into a lamentable
waste of time. Many things are worth doing if you
can do them passably well with a Httle time and
effort, which are not worth doing thoroughly if so to
do them requires much time and effort.

Time is the measure of everything in life, and
every kind of work ought to be adjusted to it. One of
the commonest mistakes we all make is spending our-
selves on things whose value is below the value of the
time they require. Many a book may be worth read-
ing rapidly so as to extract from it the few important

SOME HINTS ON READING 381

facts it contains, and yet be by no means worth a
prolonged study. Economize time in reading as in
everything else. The adage that Time is Money falls
far short of the truth. Time is worth more than
money because by its judicious employment more
enjoyment can be secured than money can purchase.

One of the less fortunate results of the large amount
of matter which the printing-press turns out in our time
is the tendency it has bred to read everything hastily
and unthinkingly. The man who glances through
several newspapers in the morning and two or three
magazines in the evening forms the habit of inattention,
or, more correctly, half attention. He reads with no in-
tention of remembering anything except what directly
and urgently bears upon his own business, and when
in the scanty leisure which business and the practice
of reading newspapers and magazines leave him, he
takes up a book, this habit of half attention prevents
him from appl3dng his mind to what he reads.
Instead of stimulating thought, constant reading of
this kind deadens it, and the quantity of reading and
the quantity of thinking are apt to be in inverse ratio
to one another. To say, "Don't read without think-
ing," might be deemed to be that useless thing, a
Counsel of Perfection; but I may say, "Beware of the
Reading Habit." It is one of the curses of our age.
What is wanted to-day is less printing and less reading,
but more thinking. Reading is easy, and thinking is
hard work, but the one is useless without the other.

382 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

You may ask what is the best way of trying so to
read books as to be able to retain the best they give
us. If the book be one you wish to know with abso-
lute thoroughness, as students at Oxford University
were in my time expected to know Aristotle's Ethics
and the history of Thucydides for our degree examina-
tion, you will find it a good plan to read over every day
all that you read the day before. At first this is irksome,
but it fixes things in your mind and is a saving in the
long run. Everybody has his own devices for record-
ing what he deems best in what he reads, but I can rec-
ommend that of making very short notes, or references,
on the fly leaf (or leaves) at the end and beginning of a
volume of the most important facts or views it contains,
noting the page on which each occurs, so that one can
refer promptly to the things which struck one at the
time. Where a work is either of exceptional merit for
its fertility in suggestion, or is specially rich in out-of-
the-way facts, it may be worth while to bind m
additional fly leaves. Should the book be not one's
own but borrowed from a friend or a library, one
must of course make the notes or references in a Ms.
note-book, and in that case, since the treatise will not
be at hand to refer to, it becomes necessary to make
a somewhat fuller abstract of the facts it is desired to
remember. The advantage of either method is that
the process of compressing the fact or view into the
fewest possible words helps to fix it in the memory. I
remember cases in which eight or ten entries represented

SOME HINTS ON READING 383

the total results of reading a book of four hundred
octavo pages, yet those entries might serve to make
some dark things clear.

The late Lord Acton, the most learned man I ever
knew, was in the habit of copying out on slips
of paper passages or sentences which he thought
valuable from aU the volumes he perused. He had
hundreds of cardboard boxes filled with these slips, the
boxes being labelled with the titles of their subjects;
and he seemed to know how to lay his hand upon any
extract he wanted. Few, however, could hope to bring
leisure and industry like his to the accumulation of
such a mass of knowledge ; and he spent so much time
in the process of gathering the opinions of others that
he had little left for using them or for giving the world
the fruit of his own thoughts, often far better worth
having than that which he had plucked from other
orchards.

There are those who keep note-books in which they
enter the most remarkable facts or aphorisms or
statements of doctrine and opinion which they en-
counter in the course of their reading. For persons
fortunate enough to have formed methodical habits
this may be a good plan.

Ought reading to be systematic ? Should a man lay
down a scheme and confine himself to one or more sub-
jects in which he can become proficient rather than
spread himself out in superficial sciolism over a large
number ?

384 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

For many of us Life answers this question by requir-
ing attention to be devoted primarily to books which
bear upon our occupation or are connected with it.
For others again pronounced tastes point out certain
lines of reading as those in which they will find most
pleasure. Yet there is also a third class whom neither
their avocations nor any marked personal prefer-
ences guide in any particular direction. My ad\dce to
these would be : If you have not got a definite taste, try
to acquire one. Find some pursuit or line of study which
you can relish, and give to it most of your spare time.
It wiU be a constant spring of pleasure, an occupation
in solitude, a distraction from worries, even a consola-
tion in misfortune, to have something unconnected
with one's daily work to which one can turn for change
and refreshment of spirit. Some branch of natural
history, or some one of the physical sciences, is perhaps
the best for this purpose, but any branch of history
or archaeology or art (including, as one of the very
best, music) will serve. When one has such a pursuit
or taste, it naturally becomes the central line which a
man's reading follows. In advising a concentration of
study upon some few topics, I do not suggest that you
should cease to interest yourselves in the general
movements of the world. Everyone ought to try to
keep abreast of his time, so far at least as not to be
ignorant of the great advances that are being made.
Of most of these you will not be able to know
much, but the more you can know, the better, so long

SOME HINTS ON READING 385

as you do not scatter and dissipate your efforts in such
wise as to become a mere smatterer.

There is a maxim which, Hke that other venerable
dictum already referred to, sounds good but has often
done harm. (A book might be written with the title
Moral Maxims and the Mischief they Do.) You all
remember the lines:

A little learning is a dangerous thing ;
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.

With all respect to the poet, this is by no means
true. A little learning is not dangerous so long as you
know that it is little. Danger begins with thinking you
know much more than you do. It is not knowledge,
be it great or small, but the conceit of knowledge, that
misleads men : and the best remedy against this is not
ignorance, but the knowing some one thing really well.
Thoroughness in one subject enables a man to recog-
nize his scantiness of attainment in other subjects, not
to add that to have learnt any one thing well helps
him in dealing with whatever else he touches, since
he learns to discern more quickly what is essential,
and to make sure that his knowledge, even if it
remains elementary, is not merely superficial.

Do not be surprised if after advising you to read
thoroughly I also advise you to learn to read swiftly.
There is no inconsistency, for thoroughness depends
not so much on the time spent on a piece of work as
upon the intensity wherewith the mind is concentrated

386 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

upon it. One man will read a book in haK as many
hours as another, and yet know more of what is in
the book ; and this because of his superior power of
turning upon it the full stream of his mental energy.
Only exceptional minds possess this gift in high
measure, as did Macaulay, who read a book so swiftly
that he seemed to turn the pages almost without
pausing, taking in at one glance all that was in them,
and yet carrying away all that was worth remem-
bering. But you can cultivate the gift by practice,
and it deserves cultivating, for it means better results
with less time spent.

The counsel of swift reading is, of course, appU-
cable only to books which are read chiefly for their
facts or their views, not to those whose merit hes
largely in their style. It would be folly to gallop
through Virgil or Keats or Charles Lamb or Heinrich
Heine or Chateaubriand. Not in poetry only must
one move deliberately, but also in reading fine and
finished prose, where every word has its fitting place
in the sentence, and its due effect in calling up subtle
associations and in touching, however delicately, the
spring of emotion.

Finally, let me suggest that you read with inde-
pendence. There are various spirits in which a
book may be approached. One must not be captious,
hunting out mistakes or blemishes. But neither must
one submissively assume that the author is always
right. No author, however great, is exempt from

SOME HINTS ON READING 387

error. True it is that modesty is always in order,
and deference due to writers of established credit.
We must take them as likely to be wiser than we are.
Nevertheless, if you wish to profit by your reading,
do not forget to scrutinize each argument as it is pre-
sented, each inference drawn, each maxim delivered,
to see if it be justified by the facts. Sound criticism
seeks rather to discover and appreciate merits than to
note faults ; but however ready we may be to admire,
we must test our author as we go along, and make
sure that the view we accept from him is formed not
because he has given it but because he has con-
vinced us that it is correct. As your forefathers said
that perpetual vigilance is the price of freedom, so
you may say that it is also the price of learning. In
a free country every citizen is responsible for the
formation of his opinions, and must take them neither
from newspapers nor from platform speeches. So in
the domain of knowledge a man will lose half the
benefit of his study if he reads in a passively receptive
way, neglecting to apply his own judgment. Often
he will not be able to test his author. Often when he
differs from his author the author will be right, and he
wrong in venturing to differ. Nevertheless, such error
is better than an indolent acquiescence which brings
to bear no independent thought.

To say this is to repeat in different words the remark
that the reading which counts is the reading which,
in making a man think, stirs and exercises and polishes

/
388 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

the edge of his mind. The end of study is not to pos-
sess knowledge as a man possesses the coins in his
purse, but to make knowledge a part of ourselves, that
is, to turn knowledge into thought, as the food we eat
is turned into the life-giving and nerve-nourishing
blood. It is to have a mind so stored and equipped
that it shaU be to each man, as to the imprisoned sage,
his kingdom, of which no one can deprive him. When
you have begun by forming the habit of thinking as
you read, and exercising your own judgment freely,
though modestly, you will find your footing grow
firmer and surer as you advance, and will before long
know for yourselves what to read and how to read.
Life has few greater pleasures.

NATIONAL PARKS — THE NEED OF THE
FUTURE

Address Delivered before the Eighth Annual Convention
OF THE American Civic Association, Baltimore, Maryland,
November 20, 1912, the Hon. Walter L. Fisher, Secre-
tary OF THE Interior, Presiding.

NATIONAL PARKS — THE NEED OF THE
FUTURE

Address Delivered before the Eighth Annual Convention
OF THE American Civic Association, Baltimore, Maryland,
November 20, 191 2, the Hon. Walter L. Fisher, Secre-
tary of the Interior, Presiding.

Having come here for the first time forty-two years
ago, I have knov^n the United States long enough to
feel just as much interested in all those questions that
relate to your welfare, in city and in country, as if I
were one of your own citizens, and I hope you will allow
me to speak to you with that freedom which you would
allow to one of your citizens. In discussing a subject
so far removed from politics or any other controversial
field as is that which occupies you this evening, I need
not feel those limitations which an official position
would otherwise impose.

There is one thing better even than that City
Beautiful to which previous speakers have referred,
and that is the Country Beautiful. Before there
were cities there was a Country. It holds for us
greater and more varied beauties than a city can, and
it contains more that appeals to our imagination, and
is associated with the sweet recollections of childhood.

391

392 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

Let me say something about the need for preserving
rural beauty.

I have had in England some experience in dealing
with the questions you are discussing, having been
for some years chairman of a society for preserving
commons and open spaces and public rights of way,
and having also served on the committee of another
society for securing to the public places of national
and historic interest. Thus I was led often to think
of what is our duty to the future, and of the benefits
which the preservation of places of natural beauty
may confer on the community. That is a problem
which presents itself, not only in Great Britain, but
all over Europe, and now you in America are tend-
ing to become what Europe already is. Europe is
now a populous, almost overcrowded, continent. You
will some day be a populous and ultimately, perhaps,
except in those regions which the want of rain con-
demns to sterility, a crowded continent, and it is
well to take thought at once, before the days of over-
crowding confront you, how you will deal %^dth the
difficulties which have met us in Europe, so that you
may learn as much as possible from our experience,
and not find too late that the beauty and primitive
simplicity of nature have been snatched from you by
private individuals.

I need not descant upon that which the love of nature
is, or at least ought to be, to each and all of us. Of
all those pleasures, the power to enjoy which has been

NATIONAL PARKS 393

implanted in us, the love of nature is the very
simplest and best. It is the most easily accessible, it
is one which can never be perverted, it is one of which
(as the old darky said about the watermelon) you can-
not have too much. It lasts from youth to age. We
cannot enjoy it in the form of strenuous physical
exercise with the same fulness in old age, because our
powers of walking, swimming, and climbing are not the
same, but we have an ampler and richer enjoyment in
some other ways, because we have the memories and
associations of the past and especially of those in whose
company we have in bygone days visited beautiful
scenes. And there are also the literary associations
with which poetry clothes many a wild or lovely spot.
The farther a people recedes from barbarism, the more
refined are its tastes, the more gentle its manners, the
less sordid its aims, so much the greater is its suscepti-
bility to every form of beauty, so much the more do
the charms of nature appeal to it. Delight in them
is a test of civilization.

As the love of nature is happily increasing among us,
it becomes all the more important to find means for
safeguarding nature. Population is also increasing,
and thus the number of people who desire to enjoy
nature is growing larger both absolutely and in
proportion to the whole. But, unfortunately, the
opportunities for enjoyment, except as regards easier
locomotion, are not increasing. The world is circum-
scribed, and we feel the narrowness of it more and

394 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

more as all its corners are explored and surveyed. The
surface of this little earth of ours is indeed sadly
limited, and we cannot add to it. When a man finds
his house too small, he builds more rooms on to it, but
we cannot add to our earth ; we did not make it, it
was made for us, and we cannot by taking thought in-
crease its dimensions. All that can be done is turn it
to the best possible account.

Now, let us remember that the quantity of natural
beauty in the world, that is to say, the regions and
spots calculated to give enjoyment in the highest form,
are limited, and are being constantly encroached upon.
This encroachment takes four forms. There is the de-
sire of private persons to appropriate beautiful scenery
to themselves by enclosing it in private grounds and
debarring the public from access to it. We in England
and Scotland have lost some of the most beautiful scen-
ery we possess because it has been taken into private
estates. There is the habit of excluding people even
from land uncultivated and remote from houses for the
sake of "sport." A great deal of the finest scenery
in Scotland is now practically unapproachable by the
pedestrian or the artist or the naturalist because rich
people have appropriated it to their own self-regarding
purposes and insist on excluding the public. This is
especially the case where the motive for exclusion is
what is called sport. Sport is understood to mean
killing God's creatures for man's amusement, and for
the sake of this amusement — the killing of deer and

NATIONAL PARKS 395

birds, an amusement which gives pleasure only to a
handful of men — very large areas in Britain (and
some few also in other parts of Europe) have been
within the last sixty or seventy years closed against
all the rest of the nation.

The enjoyment of natural beauty is further threatened
by the operations of the lumberman. He is a force
we do not have to fear in Britain, because timber
no longer exists there in sufficient quantity to be an
article of economic value to us, but it is a very serious
question here. You have prodigious and magnificent
forests; there are perhaps no others in the world
comparable for extent and splendor with those you
possess. These forests, especially those on the Cas-
cade range and the Sierra Nevada, are now being cut
down rapidly and ruthlessly. You cannot blame the
men who are cutting and selling the timber ; timber is
needed, and they want to drive their trade, but the
process goes on too fast, and much of the charm of
nature is lost, while the interests of the future are for-
gotten. Superb woods of the huge Sequoia gigantea,
the so-called Big Trees, were falling under the axe in
the southern part of the Sierra Nevada in 1909, and
it would take a thousand years to replace these giants.
The same thing is happening in the Appalachian ranges
in New England and in the Alleghanies southward
from Pennsylvania, a country of great sylvan beauty.
In many places, after the trees have been cut off, there
is left an inextricable tangle of small boughs and twigs,

396 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

SO that when a dry year comes any spark will start a
fire, and the fire rages among the dead boughs, and the
land is so scorched that for many long years no great
trees will rise to replace those that were destroyed.

Note also that in recent years water power has,
since scientific discoveries enabled it to be applied in
the form of electricity, become an asset of great com-
mercial value. You fortunately have an enormous
supply of water power. No one will deny that a great
deal of it, perhaps most of it, may be properly used
for industrial purposes, but neither can it be doubted
that it has been used in some places to the detriment,
and even to the ruin, of scenery. It has been used at
Niagara, for instance, to such an extent as to change
completely the character of what was once the most
beautiful waterfall landscape in the whole world.
Those of you who did not see that landscape, as I did,
forty- two years ago, with the long line of clear green
water plunging over the precipice, the foaming splen-
dour of the rapids above, and the tossing billows of the
Whirlpool Gorge below, and so cannot contrast what
is seen now with what was seen in those days, cannot
know what a wretched shadow of its former self it has
become — not so much by the diminution of the flow
of the river as by the hideous erections which line the
shores and by the smoke from many a chimney that
pollutes the air. It is not too late to repair what has
been done, and I hope the day will come when the
pristine flow of its waters will be restored, and when

NATIONAL PARKS 397

the devastating agencies will have been removed. That
we wiU leave for a future generation which will have
begun to appreciate scenery more highly than men did
thirty years ago, when the ruin of which I speak was just
beginning. One may say of the enterprising capitalists
who have made fortunes out of this national possession
what the Emperor Charles the Fifth said to the eccle-
siastics of Cordova who had turned the central part of
the great Mosque into a church. " You have destroyed
something that was absolutely unique in the world in
order to do something which could have been equally
weU done anywhere else."

Taking all these causes together, you can see how
many encroachments there are upon the unique beauty
of your country; and I beg you to consider that, al-
though the United States is vast and has mountain and
forest regions far more extensive than we can boast in
little countries like England or Scotland, even your
scenery is not inexhaustible, and, with your great popu-
lation and the growing desire to enjoy the beauties of
nature, you have not any more than you need. For-
tunately, you have made a good beginning in the work of
conservation. You have led the world in the creation
of National Parks. I have seen three or four of these,
the Yosemite twice, the Yellowstone twice, and the
splendid forest region which you have around that
mountain which the people of Seattle now insist on
calling Mount Rainier, — no doubt the name originally
given by Vancouver, — but which used, when I wan-

398 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

dered through its forests and traversed its glaciers,
thirty years ago, to be called by the more sonorous
Indian name, Tacoma. And there is also that superb
reserve on the north side of the Grand Canon of the
Colorado River, as well as Glacier Park in Mon-
tana and others of minor extent in other parts
of the country. The creation of such National Parks
has not only been good for you, but has had the ad-
mirable effect of setting other countries to emulate
your example. Australia and New Zealand have fol-
lowed that example. New Zealand, in the district of
its hot springs and geysers, has dedicated to the public
a scenic area something similar to your Yellowstone
Park geyser region, though not on so extensive a scale ;
the people of New South Wales have set off three
beautiful National Parks within forty miles of the
capital city of Sydney, taking mountain and forest
regions of exquisite beauty and keeping them for a
source of delight to the growing population of that city.
Thus your example is bearing good fruit. I only wish
it had come sooner to us in England and Scotland
before we had permitted the control of so much of our
own best scenery to pass into private ownership.

One of the things your Association has to care for
is not only the provision of more parks, but also the
methods to be followed for keeping the existing parks in
the best condition. I heard the other day that a ques-
tion has been raised as to whether automobiles should
be admitted in the Yosemite Valley. May a word be

NATIONAL PARKS 399

permitted on that subject ? If Adam had known what
harm the serpent was going to work, he would have
tried to prevent him from finding lodgment in Eden ;
and if you stop to realize what the result of the auto-
mobile will be in that wonderful, that incomparable
valley, you will keep it out. The one drawback to
enjoyment of the Yosemite Valley in the summer and
autumn is the dust. The granite rock becomes in the
roads fine sand ; even under existing conditions the
feet of the horses and the wheels of the vehicles raise
a great deal of it, enough to interfere with enjoyment
as one drives or walks; but the conditions would
become grievously worse with the swift automobile.
And, further, the automobile would destroy what may
be called the sentimental charm of the landscape. It
is not merely that dust clouds would fill the air and coat
the foliage, but the whole feeling of the spontaneity
and freshness of primitive nature would be marred by
this modern invention, with its din and whir and
odious smell. Remember, moreover, that one cannot
really enjoy fine scenery when travelling at a rate of
fifteen to twenty or twenty-five miles an hour. If you
want to enjoy the beauty of such landscapes as the Yo-
semite presents, you must see them slowly. Fine scenery
is seen best of all in walking, when one can stop at any
moment and enjoy any special point of view, hut
it is also agreeably seen in riding or driving, because
in moving at a pace of five or six miles an hour you
are not going too fast to take in the minor beauties of

400 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

the landscape. But travelling faster than that — and
my experience is that chauffeurs so delight in speed
that it is hard to get them to slacken even when you
bid them — you cannot enjoy the beauty. It was
often my duty in the British Parliament to oppose bills
conferring powers to build railways through some of the
beautiful lake and valley scenery, — scenery on a much
smaller scale than that of this Continent, but quite as
beautiful, which we possess in Britain. The advocates of
the bills urged that passengers could look out at the land-
scape from the windows of the railroad car. But we
pointed out that it is impossible to get the full enjoy-
ment of a romantic landscape from a railway window,
especially where the beauties are delicate and the scale
small. It is different where scenery is on a vast scale,
so that the railway is insignificant in comparison, and
the objects, rocks or mountains or rivers, are huge.
There one may get some pleasure from the big \iews
even as seen from a train, though they are far better
seen in walking or driving, but you cannot enjoy the]
small beauties either of form or of colour. The focus is
always changing, and it is impossible to give that kind
of enjoyment which a painter, or any devotee of
nature, seeks if you are hurrying past at a swift auto-
mobile pace. Whoever loves fine scenery has a sort of
feeling that he is wasting it when he passes through it]
on a train instead of on foot or driving in an open!
vehicle.

It will of course be said that the automobile misrht '

NATIONAL PARKS 401

be allowed to come up to the principal hotels and go
no farther. If it is allowed to go so far as that, it will
soon be allowed to go wherever else there is a road
to bear it. Do not let the serpent enter Eden at all.
Our friends who possess automobiles are numerous,
wealthy, and powerful, but as all the rest of the North
American Continent is open to them they are not
gravely injured when one valley, besides parts of
Mount Desert Island, is reserved for those who walk
or ride. It is no intolerable hardship to be required
to forgo in one spot a convenience which none of us
had twenty years ago and which the great majority of
our fellow-creatures cannot afford to pay for now. At
present the railway comes to an end some twelve miles
away from the entrance of the Yosemite Park, and
the drive up to it behind horses gives far more pleas-
ure than a journey by rail or motor car possibly could.
There are plenty of roads elsewhere for the lovers of
speed and noise, without intruding on these few places
where the wood nymphs and the water nymphs ought
to be allowed to remain in untroubled seclusion, and
their true worshippers to have the landscape to them-
selves.

Let me pay a tribute to the taste and judgment
with which, as it seemed to me when I visited the
valley in 1909, the park and the hotels in the Yo-
semite were being managed. There were no offensive
signs, no advertisements of medicines, no other external
disfigurements to excite horror, and the inns were all

4C2 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

of moderate size, plain but sufficiently comfortable and
not more than two stories high. I earnestly hope
that the administration wiU always be continued on
these lines, with this same regard for landscape beauty.
Now, a word about additional parks. Although you
have set a wholesome example in creating those I have
mentioned and some others, there are still other places
where National Parks are wanted. There is a splendid
region in the Alleghanies, a region of beautiful forests,
where the tulip trees lift their tall, smooth shafts
and graceful heads one hundred and fifty feet or more
into the air, a mountain land on the borders of
North Carolina and East Tennessee, with romantic
river valleys and hills clothed with luxiu"iant woods,
primitive forests standing as they stood before the
white man drove the Indians away, high lawns filled
with flowers and traversed by sparkling brooks, con-
taining everything to delight the heart of the lover
of nature. It would be a fine thing to have a tract
of three or four hundred thousand acres set apart
here for the benefit of the people of the South and
Middle Atlantic States, for whom it is a far cry
to the Rockies. Then you ought to have one or
two additional parks in Colorado and jMontana
also. As regards the Northeast Atlantic States, what
seems to be most wanted is to preserve the forests of
the White and Green Mountains. Perhaps it is not
necessary to set apart in that country a National Park
in the same sense as that which might be thought

NATIONAL PARKS 403

requisite in the Alleghanies, because the mountains are
so high and rocky, and so Httle ground is suitable for
cultivation on the steeper slopes, that it is not likely
they will be inclosed, and probably hardly necessary
that a public authority should step in to save them.
But in some parts of the White Mountains, for instance,
it would be an excellent thing to create large forest
reserves, where the trees should be under protection
of the National or State Government, being cut by
them as required, and the forests replanted as they are
cut. Recent legislation has already made a beginning
with this good work. The sale of the timber would
more than cover the costs of management and the in-
terest on the purchase money. In this way you would
keep a place where the beauty of the woodlands would
remain for all generations, and where they would be
so cared for that the present danger of forest fires
would be averted.

There is one question that comes very near to you
in Baltimore, and also to us in Washington, on which I
would like to speak a word. You know there is a great
deal of charming forest country between Baltimore
and Washington. A good deal of it is forest of the
second growth, some few small bits of it are of the first
growth ; but even that of the second contains a great
number of beautiful, fine-grown trees. The land is
of no considerable value, and I believe it could now
be purchased at a low price. I have heard it sug-
gested that thirty-six dollars an acre would be an aver-

404 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

age price for the land, on which a great quantity of
timber remains. Having frequently taken walking
excursions from Washington into the country from
ten to fifteen or twenty miles around the city, I have
been struck with the beauty and profusion of the
wild flowers. The flora of that region, being a sort of
blend of the flora of the North Atlantic States \\dth
some of the plants and flowers which belong to the
South Atlantic region, is of great interest to the scien-
tific botanist. Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washing- 'HJ
ton are all swiftly growing cities. What could be done
better for the inhabitants of these three cities than to
secure for their enjoyment a large part of this forest
land and set it apart, forever free from private purposes
or use of agriculture, and keep it as a forest reserve,
to be managed scientifically, so that it should pay for
the expense of working it by the timber which could
be cut and sold on well-planned scientific lines, and
should afford a place where people could go and wan-
der about at their own sweet will, just as the old
settlers did when they first came here ? Here the auto-
mobile would do no harm on the main roads, because
there would be plenty of byways and forest footpaths.
If the automobilist wants to be w^hirled along the
roads, let him have his way, but keep wide sylvan
spaces where those who seek quiet and the sense of
communing with nature can go out in the early morn-
ing from the city and spend a whole day enjojdng one
spot after another where nature has provided her

NATIONAL PARKS " 405

simple joys, mingled shade and sunlight falling on the
long vistas of the forest, the ripple and the murmur of
a streamlet, the rustling of the leaves, and the birds
singing among the branches. These gifts can here be
offered to the man condemned to spend most of his
life in cities, and when nature has provided them in
such bountiful measure ought not the opportunity to
be taken to secure them?

Shall we who make these plans be accused of treat-
ing this subject in a sentimental way ? Well, I con-
fess these arguments are not addressed to those who
think that man lives by bread alone, or who recognize
no values except those measured by dollars and cents.
It is because the members of this Association are not
of that mind that such considerations are submitted.
A century hence there will be in North America, if
things go on as they are going on now, far more people,
far more lovers of nature, and also fewer places in
which nature can be enjoyed.

Now let me try to give some logical quality to
these rambling reflections by submitting a few propo-
sitions in order.

The world seems likely to last a long, long time, and
we ought to make provision for the future.

The population of the world is increasing rapidly,
and most rapidly in North America.

The taste for natural beauty is also increasing, and,
as we hope, will continue to increase.

The places of scenic beauty do not increase, but, on

4o6 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

the contrary, are in danger of being reduced in num-
ber and diminished in quantity. This is due chiefly
to the accumulation of wealth. Forests are cut
down, water power is appropriated, rich men buy
up tracts of land and frequently seek to exclude the
public from them. Accordingly, no better service can be
rendered to the masses of the people than to preserve
for their delight wide spaces of fine scenery.

We must carefully guard what we have got, and
must extend the policy which you have wisely adopted
in creating your existing National Parks, by acquiring
and preserving further areas for the perpetual enjoy-
ment of the people.

Let us think of the future. We are trustees for the
future. We are not here for ourselves alone. All
these gifts were not given to us to be used by one gen-
eration, or with the thought of one generation only
before our minds. We are the heirs of those who have
gone before, and charged with the duty we owe to
those who come after, and there is no duty which seems
more clearly incumbent on us than that of handing on
to them undiminished opportunities and facilities for
the enjoyment of some of the best gifts that the
Creator has bestowed upon his children.

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED
STATES

Address to the Pennsylvania Society of New York,
December 14, 191 2.

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED
STATES

Address to the Pennsylvania Society of New York,
December 14, 191 2.

It is a real pleasure to be the guest of The Penn-
sylvania Society. Every student of history must be
profoundly interested in the annals of the State of
Pennsylvania, not merely in respect of its famous
founder, one of the most remarkable Englishmen of
the seventeenth century, but also because it is in a
sense typical of this whole country. Your State
is remarkable for having been from very early days
the seat of three different elements of population
which have gradually become blent, yet not so blent
as to lose traces of their former diversity. Three sets of
colonists long ago entered and settled down in and made
the prosperity and greatness of Pennsylvania in its
formative years, just as in days far later many different
races came hither across the sea and added themselves
to the original Anglo-Saxon population who had been
the first settlers of this eastern coast of North America.
Here in Pennsylvania you had the English Quakers,
then the Germans, who came in a little later, many of
them also pious men belonging to various German

409

4IO UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

sects, and, lastly, the Scotch-Irish, people very unlike
the other two, except in their being also pious, though
in a quite different way. The Quakers and the
Germans fulfilled the dictum that the meek shall
inherit the earth, because they took up and retained
all the best lands. The Scotch-Irish, who came last,
were obliged to content themselves with the moun-
tains and the Indians, and they braced themselves
to deal with both. They developed a manly, bold, pug-
nacious type of pioneer and frontiersman, and they
have retained the old character in your western hills
just like their relatives in the northeastern parts of
Ireland. Plenty of the old combative spirit in both
regions. They had a lively time in early Pennsylvania,
for these three sections were divided not only by politi-
cal feelings and by agricultural rivalries, but also by reH-
gious and ecclesiastical differences. In those days diver-
gences of doctrine cut pretty deep and roused far more
feeling than they would to-day, even in the pacific
breasts of members of the Society of Friends. An
occasion is recorded on which a Quaker went so far
that he was with difficulty restrained from discharging
a gun, which unluckily happened to be in his hands,
into the body of a Presbyterian, having apparently
been incensed by an intimation on the part of thai
Calvinist that predestination was going to give that
particular Quaker no prospect of felicity in the world]
to come.
I must, however, pass away from the State of Penn-J

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 411

sylvania and its fortunes, to the subject allotted to me
— the Constitution of the United States ; a small
subject indeed, is it not ? and easy to deal with in the
few minutes at my command.

Let me begin by one remark, about which there will
be no difference of opinion : It was a most extraordi-
nary body of men that gathered together one hun-
dred and twenty-five years ago to frame the Constitu-
tion of the United States. Never did such a group of
brilliant and powerful intellects, men trained by an
experience of affairs, assemble together .for so great an
undertaking as the framing of the Constitution for a
nation. And the best proof of the success which at-
tended their efforts is to be found in the fact that
the Constitution which they framed for a nation that
then only a little exceeded 3,000,000 people has been
found now to fit the needs of 93,000,000. It may not
fit those needs perfectly, but it is extraordinary that it
should fit them at all.

In that group there were three men, Washington,
Franklin, and Hamilton, whose fame belongs to the
history of the world, and one of those three, Benjamin
Franklin, came as a delegate from the State of Penn-
sylvania. Among the others, eminent men, even if
they did not attain unto those first three, one of the
most eminent came also as a delegate from the State
of Pennsylvania. I mean James Wilson ; a Scotsman
from Fife who had few equals and possibly no superior
in that Convention, as respects either the acuteness

412 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

of his mind, or his penetration and sagacity ; a man to
whom some of the best features of the Constitution
were due, and who, by his speeches in your Pennsyl-
vania convention held to consider the draft prepared
by the Convention, added an illuminating commentary
upon many provisions of the Constitution, and no doubt
contributed materially to its adoption, both in your
State and in the other States of the Union.

Now, I am under certain restraints here. I re-
member a time in England when young Liberal orators
used to glorify the British Constitution as " the para-
gon of the world," "the perfection of human wisdom,"
nor did the other party abound any less in praise, for
each party claimed that the Constitution embodied its
own distinctive principles. So here too both parties and
both sections of the country vied in their admiration
of your Constitution, for both insisted that the ven-
erable instrument, if correctly interpreted, supported
its own tenets. But in England those paeans of praise
are now seldom heard ; and here in America the Con-
stitution seems to be drifting down the stream of time
into the neighbourhood of the icebergs of controversy.
Accordingly I must not allow myself to approach any
questions which are becoming issues between parties. I
cannot leap over the wire fence which incloses the rep-
resentative of another country and, like my distin-
guished friend, the Attorney-General, prance and gallop
far and wide in the open plains of politics. From any
discussion of whether and how the Constitution ought

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 413

to be amended, I must refrain, but I am free to speak
of what it has been in the past, and may examine the
working of certain usages that have grown up under it
which neither party is concerned to defend or to attack
and which are now exposing it to unmerited censure.

The whole history of your country since 1789 has been
a commentary upon the services rendered by the Con-
stitution. The greatest of all the services it could ren-
der and did render, was the spirit which it implanted in
the hearts of your people. Perhaps I ought not to say
"implanted," for the spirit was already there, and the
function of the Constitution was to confirm and develop
it. Your ancestors brought from England the prin-
ciple of deference for law, and the sentiment which
desired to unite Liberty with Order, but that spirit
was immensely strengthened and its roots deepened by
the provisions of the Constitution, which combined,
as no instrument had ever done before, a respect for
the settled rule of law, with a recognition of the sov-
ereignty of the people. It showed how the popular
will can express itself through prescribed forms, with
such due regard for and observance of legal methods
as to avoid the dangers of sudden impulses and hasty
action, while also in such a way as ultimately to give
complete effect to the sober and deliberate purpose of
the people.

Some critics, both here and in Europe, have made it a
reproach against the Constitution that it did not
avert the War of Secession, and others have gone so

414 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

far as to suggest that its failing to either recognize or
deny the right of a State or States to secede was itself
a proximate cause of the war by giving each party an
arguable legal case. To this criticism the answer is
that if such a provision had been placed in the Consti-
tution there might probably never have been any
Constitution at all. Whether any legal instrument
could have prevented a split and a conflict where eco-
nomic differences were so marked, where each section
of the nation misunderstood the other, and where pas-
sion had in one of them risen to white heat, may well
be doubted. Legal forms may do much, but cannot
do everything. So far as we can now judge, there was
only one thing would have enabled the South and the
North to hold together, and that thing was unattain-
able. It has probably struck some of you that had the
United States remained in political connection with the
mother country, there would have been no Civil War.
South and North fought because there was no one to
mediate between and try to reconcile them. Had they
been part of a British nation there might have been — •
indeed, would almost certainly have been — mediation.
The question of slavery, if indeed slavery had been still
in existence, would no doubt have been a question for
themselves to settle, for long before 1861 they would
have been enjoying a self-government at least as large
as Canada and Australia now enjoy under the British
flag. But as members of one British people, both
North and South would have been kept in union as

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 415

parts of a larger whole, and the influence of the rest
of the British people at home would have been suffi-
cient to soften antagonisms and bring about a peaceable
solution.

The Constitution could not avert the Civil War, but
it maintained the ideal of national unity all through the
Civil War, and it enabled the wounds which the war had
made to be subsequently healed with a rapidity and
completeness which amazed the world. During and for
some time after the Civil War it rendered a service
such as no legal instrument had ever rendered to a peo-
ple before. You had enormous difficulties then. The
difficulties during the war, when it was all that the
President could do to avoid putting a strain on the
Constitution, were hardly more alarming than those
that came later in that sad and troublous period of
reconstruction through which your Southern brothers
passed. The situation would have been almost hope-
less but for the fact that the Constitution laid down
the lines upon which each Southern State should be
ultimately restored to self-government and again take
its place as a self-governing member of the Union.
When Reconstruction was over, and when, in and after
1877, more normal relations were reestablished in the
South, the Constitution again became a rallying point
for the patriotic sentiment of the whole people and
for their devotion to the principles which had originally
made it strong and your nation great. Your National
unity, never so conspicuous or so firmly entrenched as

4i6 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

it is to-day, is largely due to the fact that you all have
revered and trusted and walked by your now venerable
Constitution.

True it is that all constitutions must needs be sus-
ceptible of such amendments or developments as are
needed to adapt them to the changing circumstances
which time brings with them. As Bacon says, " That
which man changeth not for the better Time changeth
for the worse." But you will also observe that all
constitutions, and all systems of free governments
everywhere, require something to steady them. Now,
we in England, who have no documentary consti-
tution placed above the other laws of the country,
where every arrangement of the government can
be at any moment changed by the power of the
people acting through their representatives in Parlia-
ment, we in England have steadying forces in the
existence of long traditions, and of powerful classes
who have held great influence throughout the whole
nation. In France there has been and is a steady-
ing influence in the existence of a large number of
small landed proprietors attached to the rights of
property. In Germany a similar influence may be
found, not only in the presence of a strong monarchy
and of a landholding class which has commanded the
deference of the people for centuries, but also in an
exceedingly able and highly trained civil service,
which administers public affairs. You in this country
have neither the social classes of Continental Europe

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 417

nor have you the power of a civil service like that of
Germany. But as you also need some steadying ele-
ment, you have found it in the respect for your Con-
stitution. It has made your traditions. It has been
revered as a sort of palladium of ordered liberty.
Whatever changes you now think fit to make in
your Constitution you will, I am sure, never forget
that ballast as well as sails are needed if a ship is to
pursue with safety her course over seas that are some-
times stormy.

There are, as you all know, two chief parts or
branches of the Federal Constitution — that which
creates the system of National Government, with its
three departments, and that which defines the relation
of the National Government to the governments and
people of the States. Of these two the former part,
which establishes the frame of National Government,
has been criticized, and in some points unfavourably,
both by your own statesmen and by foreign observers,
much more than has the latter part, which determines
the relations between the National Government and the
States. Now let me ask you to note that these criti-
cisms upon the practical working of the frame of
national government are really in the main criticisms
not of the Constitution itself but of usages which have
grown up under it but are no part of it and could be
changed at any moment by Congress or by the action
of the people themselves.

One of the complaints most frequently heard is that

4i8 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

members of Congress have been tending to become too
much mere local delegates, rather than members of the
great council of the Nation, and that they are so active
in furthering the interest each of his own constituency
and his own State, that they think too little, and care
too little, for the general interests of the whole people,
though it is itself more than ever One People. If the
facts are as these censors assert, — and you can judge
better than I whether the censors are right, — what is
the cause ? Not any provision of the Constitution but
the habit which has prevailed and prevails to-day, of
confining the choice of a member of Congress to persons
resident in the particular Congressional district, and the
habit which the people of the district have formed of ex-
pecting Congress to appropriate money for local pur-
poses. Such usages are no parts of democracy, for there
are other democratic countries in which they do not
prevail. They inevitably tend to narrow a member's
views as well as his activities, and they prevent an.
able man who by some turn of the political tide has
lost his seat in the place where he resides from obtaining
a seat elsewhere. Nearly all your own leading men, as
well as foreign observers, think that you lose inomensely
by the exclusion from Congress of so many of your
strongest intellects, and they regret the persistence
of the habit. Take the case of such a statesman,
eminent both by his talents and by the purity and eleva-
tion of his character, as the late Mr. Carl Schurz, who
after he left Missouri to settle in New" York City could

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 419

■never find entrance to Congress. In Britain, more
democratic in most respects than this country, nearly
all the eminent statesmen of the last sixty years have
represented constituencies in which they did not re-
side, and represented them quite as efficiently as resi-
dents could have done. This is common in Australia
also, a country more democratic than either the United
States or Great Britain.

Another feature of the present working of your
National Government which I have heard constantly
criticized by thoughtful American statesmen is that
the separation of the legislative and executive depart-
ments has been carried too far by the custom which
does not allow the ministers of the President access
to the floor of Congress to speak and to be interro-
gated there. Now this custom has grown up inde-
pendently of the Constitution. It is not a part of the
Constitution, and Congress has therefore the power
at any time to alter if it should think fit. Foreign
observers who are accustomed to the methods of
the free countries of Europe think that you are sac-
rificing a valuable means of bringing your legislative
and your executive authorities into a natural and
easy and constant harmony by your forbidding them
to come together in the way I have mentioned. They
are allowed so to come together in Switzerland. Swit-
zerland has a federal constitution like yours. Switzer-
land, like you, does not permit the members of the
Administration, which there consists of a body of

420 UNIVERSITY AND mSTORICAL ADDRESSES

seven persons called the Federal Council, to be elected
to and sit in either House of its federal legislature ; but
it permits them and encourages them to be present in
either House, and when I have been attending the
debates of the federal legislature in Switzerland I have
seen the members of the Federal Council, sometimes
in the one House, sometimes in the other, interrogated
by members upon questions relating to the adminis-
tration of their departments, answering those questions,
giving the fullest information upon every executive
act done or perhaps even contemplated by them, and
at the same time addressing the members of the legis-
lature upon the measures that were pending there,
stating their views, telling them what was wanted, in
the way of money or otherwise, to increase the efficiency
of the several executive departments, and answering
any objections which the members of the legislature
could advance. No Swiss doubts that such a plan is
for the good of Switzerland. The Swiss Government,
take it all in all, seems to be the most successful and
one of the most stable among the democratic govern-
ments of the world, and could not possibly work as
smoothly and successfully as it does work but for this
practice — and, as you know, the plan of admitting
Cabinet Ministers to speak in Congress has been rec-
ommended by many of your own statesmen, as, for
instance, by President Garfield.

Any proposal for the admission of Cabinet Ministers
to the floor of either House, to be questioned there

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 421

and to speak there, well deserves to be considered
as a possible improvement in the conduct of busi-
ness by Congress. To suggest that the Constitution
itself ought to be so altered as to permit ministers
to be elected to and vote in Congress would be quite
another matter, for it would raise different and far
wider issues. It would mean a change in your whole
scheme of government. Our English system — what
we call our Cabinet and Parliamentary System — is no
doubt a far more prompt and a far more effective way
of bringing the will of the people to bear upon the
government than your system is here. As I have
already observed, we in Great Britain are in reality far
more of a democracy 'than you are. The will of the
people declared in an election of the members of the
House of Commons, is able to act more quickly, more
promptly, with a more tremendous and compelling
force, in Britain than it can here. We do not have
your checks and balances. But it may well be doubted
whether the British system, however it may work with
us, would be a safe one for a country so vast and varied
in its parts as yours. There is, however, every reason
to think that Congress itself would find a great advan-
tage in having the Ministers of the President before it
on the floor, so that it could address questions to them,
as ministers are daily questioned in our Parliament.
British ministers are obliged to tell Parliament every-
thing that is being done in the course of our adminis-
tration which it is not inconsistent with the public

422 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

service to disclose. They must answer all questions put
to them about what they are doing, and how they are
doing it, and why they are doing it. It is good for them.
Like other ministers, I have, when a member of the
British cabinet, sometimes found the process tiresome.
But I never doubted that it was a good thing for
everybody concerned. Ministers are all the better for
having to stand that ordeal. You here would soon
find the benefit of it. Every minister would feel it to
be an advantage and a help to him in his work if he
were able, when his departmental experience has shown
him that some measure is urgently needed, to come to
Congress and argue the matter out with either House
on its own floor and tell them, not by written words,
but by the spoken word, which is far more effective,
why he thinks the measure is needed and what are the
arguments by which he would support it. And you
can all see how much Congress would gain by the more
thorough knowledge of the workings and the needs of
the departments which it would gain.

Others conceive that the special functions of the
Senate or perhaps the machinery by which these
functions are exercised, require to be reconsidered in
view of the fact that when they were assigned to it
the Senate had only twenty-six members, whereas it
has now ninety-six. If anything of that kind needs
to be done, it could probably be done without altering
the Constitution, just as a usage which had come to be
recognized by common consent as being one of the

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 423

greatest evils in the working of the National Govern-
ment was dealt with. I refer to the Spoils System.
That system arose outside the Constitution. It has
been now much reduced and indeed seems likely to be
soon expunged by measures requiring no change in the
Constitution. So also that scheme of national nomi-
nating conventions, which now seems likely to be
superseded by a system of nominating primaries, arose
altogether outside the Constitution, and had never
even any statutory character.

As regards the other part of your Constitution, that
which concerns the relations of the States with the
National Government, you may rest happy in the
thought that it has received the almost unqualified
admiration of the whole world. I will not say that
there may not be minor points in which it is susceptible
of improvement. Probably there are some directions
in which the progress of time has made it desirable to
expand a little the legislative authority of Congress.
Many have argued, for instance, in favour of extending
that authority to the establishment of a uniform law
of marriage and divorce. Others would extend the
range of federal authority over railroads, and would
recognize in the National Government a much longer
power of creating and supervising corporations. Others
have indicated the need for some more prompt and
effective method than now exists of securing the due
observance by each and every State of treaty obliga-
tions undertaken by the National Government. There

424 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES

may be points in which the State authorities them-
selves could be induced to desire that it should be
more easy to pass uniform legislation for the whole
country.

Still, looking at the general federal scheme in a
broad way, can anything be more clear, can anything
be more rational in theory or more convenient in apph-
cation to practice than the general principles by which
the relations of the States and the National Govern-
ment have been fixed and determined ? The prin-
ciples are as clear, as philosophically conceived, and as
precisely expressed as it is possible for the human in-
tellect to have conceived and expressed them, and they
have been worked out by your successive Administra-
tions, by Congress, and most of all by your Judicial
Bench, with an infinite and admirable dehcacy in detail.
The best testimony to the excellence of your system is
to be found in the influence that it has had upon other
countries. It is an interesting fact that your Consti-
tution and ours have been, in their general Hnes, the
patterns of all modern free constitutions. The British
Constitution has been taken as being more or less a
model by all the free governments that have been
established in Europe and in the British Colonies
since 1815. Your Constitution has been taken as a
model — imperfect as some of the reproductions have
been — by the republican governments that have been
established in every part of the western world, — that
is to say, in South America and in Central America, —

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 425

and it has also had a profound influence not only on
the latest constitution of Switzerland, that of 1874,
but also upon the federal constitutions of Canada, of
Australia, and of South Africa.

It was the glory of our two countries to have held
the torch of liberty aloft in days when there were
hardly any other free governments in the world and
when the dumb populations lay prostrate at the feet
of arbitrary power. And it has been the glory of your
coimtry in later days to render another great service
to humanity, by showing how it is possible to establish
and maintain national unity over the vast spaces of a
continent, and at the same time to secure the fullest
development of self-government in State, in county,
and in city over those vast spaces. That was a problem
which would have been deemed hopeless and insoluble
a century and a half ago, but the example of your suc-
cess has now set your system on high as a beacon for
the world to follow. Your Constitution, by the ex-
ample it has set of its working and by the halo of
fame which now surrounds it, has become one of the
vital and vitalizing forces of the modern world. Let us
honour the group of illustrious men who, meeting in
Philadelphia one hundred and twenty-five years ago,
rendered this incomparable and enduring service not
to you only, but also to all mankind.

INDEX

Acton, Lord, as a historical writer, 352 ;
method followed by, in reading,
382-383.

Alleghany Mountains, desirabiUty of a
national park in the, 401-402.

Allegiance to Humanity, address on,
247 £E.

Allen, Ethan, 272.

America, as the land of hope to Euro-
peans, 36.

American Civic Association, address
before the, 38g ff.

American Institute of Architects, ad-
dresses to the, 171 ff., 181 ff.

Anarchy, the enemy of true liberty, 14 ;
principle of the Common Law which
is a safeguard against, 46-47.

Ancient Literature, address on the Study
of, 317 ff.

Anecdotes, use of, in public speaking,
290-291.

Antrim, Scotch-Irish in, 217-218.

Appeal in criminal cases in England, 64.

Architecture and History, address on,
181 ff.

Architecture, advantages and disad-
vantages of the profession of, 184-
186; comparison of, with the study
of law, 186-187; affiliation of, with
history, 187-188; European monu-
ments of, 189-190; present lack of
originahty in, 191-194; examples
of, and magnificence of conception
of, in America, 194-195.

Aristotle, critically exact spirit found
in, 349.

Armaments, the increase in military
and naval, 251-253.

Art, appreciation of pleasures of, to be
derived from literary training, 28-29.

Athletics, excessive passion for, at uni-
versities, 240-242.

Augustine, St., 129.

Australia, national parks in, 398.
Automobiles in national parks, 398-401,

404.
Avila, architecture of churches of, 188.

B

Bacon, Sir Francis, 3.

Balboa, 269.

Bancroft, George, 345.

Bible, decreasing familiarity with the,
327-328.

Big Trees of the Sierra Nevada, preser-
vation of, 395.

Boniface, St., 129.

Books, the choice of, 367 ff.

Bracton, early legal writer, 66.

Brevity in speeches, 295-296.

Bright, John, as a speaker, 293-294.

Brooks, PhiUips, rapidity of, in speak-
ing, 293.

Brougham, Lord, on fluency in public
speaking, 284.

Browning, Robert, the reading of works
of, 374-

Brunton, Miss, Scottish authoress, 374.

Buckle's "History of Civilization," 356.

Burke, Edmund, 222.

Business, devotion to, of the normal
American, 319-320; the study of
ancient literature as an offset to
absorption in, 338.

Cabinet, the, in English legislative
system, 94.

Cabinet members, admission of, to
floor of houses of Congress recom-
mended, 419-421.

Cabots, the, 269.

Cairns, Lord, a Scotch-Irishman, 220.

Cairo, seat of learning at, 154.

California, University of, address de-
livered at, 227 ff.

427

428

INDEX

California, a country as well as a state,
229 ; progress of, in material develop-
ment, 231-232 ; growth of cities in,
at expense of the country, 235 ; great-
ness of the future possible for, 244-

245-

Calhoun, John C, 215.

Calvinism and the Scottish race, 215.

"Cambridge Modern History," lack
of superfluous literary ornament in
the, 351.

Cambridge University, beginnings of,
153-154; ideals and aims of, 157-160.

Canova, work of, in sculpture, 174-175

Carlyle, Thomas, tendency to public
speaking deplored by, 283 ; mingled
scientific and literary treatment in
historical work of, 352.

Certainty, characteristic of, in the Com-
mon Law, 47-48.

Champlain, Lake, address on the Ter-
centenary of the Discovery of, 265 ff.

Champlain, Samuel de, 8 ; fine char-
acter of, 269-270; aims of, in ex-
plorations, 273; Lake Champlain
a lasting memorial to, 279.

Charlemagne, character of mission
work of, 129.

Chattanooga, address before Missionary
Convention at, 125 fi.

Chicago, boldness of architectural plans
for, 195.

Chicago University Address, 15 £E.

Christianity, causes retarding world-
wide spread of, 137 ff. See Missions.

Cicero, discourse of, on poetry, 284.

Cities, Hfe in, contrasted with hfe in
the country, 235-236 ; necessity of
sound political conditions in, 237-
238; opportunities open to, for work
for citizens, 238.

Citizens, dependence of strength of a
state on character of its, 37-38.

Civil War, effects of the American, as
felt by Virginia, 11 ; the Constitution
and the, 413-416.

Classical studies, the purpose of, 319 ff.

Classics, time to be devoted to reading
of, 378.

Clearness in public speaking, 286-287.

Colonial type of architecture, 192.

Columba, St., 129.

Columbus, Christopher, the spirit which
actuated, 8, 269.

Common Law, address on the Influ-
ence of National Character and His-
torical Environment on Develop-
ment of the, 41 ff. ; distinguishing
quahties of the, 45 ff. ; conception
of rights of the individual citizen,
45-46; recognition of the state and
the executive as clothed with the
authority of the whole community,
46-47 ; the principles of precision,
definiteness, and exactitude in, 47-
49 ; respect for forms of legal pro-
ceedings, 49 ; love of justice and fond-
ness for subtle distinctions, 49-50;
influence on, of quaUties of race of
men who built it up, 51 5.; slavery
imder the, 59-60 ; the jury as a feature
of, 60-62; technicality of the older,
62-64 ; causes leading to growth
of system of Equity, 64 ; effect of
England's insular position on char-
acter of, 65-67 ; features of, derived
from Roman law, 67; reaction of,
on character of people who created
it, 68-69 1 importance of, for the
poUtical S3'stem of the L^nited States,
69-70; essentially identical character
of, in England and America, 70-71;
a main factor in the greatness of the
nation, 71-72.

Congress, customs of, open to discus-
sion, 417-422.

Constitution, Virginia's part in fram-
ing of, 10-11 ; address on the, 407 ff. ;
the men who framed the, 411-412;
decrease in unquaUfied admiration
for, 412; influence of, in the Civil
War, 413-415 ; as a stead j-ing ele-
ment in the state, 416-417; criti-
cisms of, in the main criticisms of
usages grown up around, 417 ff.

Cooperative methods among farmers,
237-

Corporations, legislative diflSculties
raised by, 97.

Cortez, Hernando, 8.

Cromwell, Oliver, 4.

Dante, loss from reading, in a trans-
lation, 335-336.
Darwin, Charles, 197.
Dead languages, the so-caUed, 28.

INDEX

429

Declaration of Independence, the Ameri-
can, 109, no.

Delivery, importance of, in public speak-
ing, 292-293.

De Soto, 269.

"Dictionary of National Biography,"
style followed in, 350-351.

Digby, Sir Kenehn, 71.

Down, Scotch-Irish in, 217.

Dryden, amount of, necessary to read,
374-

Dulness, avoidance of, in public speak-
ing, 291-292.

E

Ecclesiastical history, importance of
study of, 342-343-

Education, effects of modem science
as felt by, 17-18; comparison of
value of scientific and of literary, 19;
comparison of scientific and of Uterary,
as to intellectual enjoyment in later
life, 20 ff. ; effect of, on man in re-
gard to politics, 1 1 6-1 17; effect of,
on public spirit, 121-122; devotion
to truth to be instilled by, 122-123,
168 ; speciaUzation in, 303 ff. ; stimu-
lation of curiosity the chief end of,
312; one main use of a university
education to arouse interests and tastes
outside of business, 320, 338.

England, in the 17th century, 3-4;
adventurers and explorers of, con-
trasted with those of Spain, 9 ; present-
day pride of, in American republic,
12-13; system of ParUamentary
legislation in, 76 ff. ; the imiversities
of, 157-160; restoration of ecclesi-
astical edifices in, 1 89-1 91 ; honour
paid to the memory of Lincoln in,
200, 203 ; steadying forces in the
political structure of, 416.

English land law, 57.

Equity, Common Law and the system of,
64-65-

Ethics, as a field for intellectual enjoy-
ment, 26-27.

Explorers, distinguishing qualities of
the early, 8-9, 268-269.

Fiction, the reading of, 374-377.
Fluency, advantages and dangers of,
in public speaking, 284-285.

Forests, preservation of American, 277,

SOS-
France, legislative method in, 95;
steadying forces in social and political
structure of, 416.

FrankHn, Benjamin, 346, 411.

Freedom, value placed on, by settlers
of Virginia, 9; relation of, to a peo-
ple's ability to govern themselves,
114-115; necessity of, in university
teaching, 164.

Freeman, E. A., 345, 348.

Friendships, as one gain of college life,
167-168.

Froude, J. A., 346.

Fulton, Robert, a Scotch-Irishman, 216.

Gall, St., missionary to the Germans, 129.

Galloway, Scotch-Irish in, 219.

Galton, Francis, manual compiled by,
188.

Gardiner, S. R., 348.

General education and special educa-
tion, 301-315.

Germany, universities of, 156-157;
settlers from, in Pennsylvania, 409-
410; influences which are steadying
elements in, 416.

Gibbon, Edward, 345.

Glacier Park, Montana, 398.

Gladstone, WilUam, 197.

Grammar, use of, as a study, 321.

Grand Canon of the Colorado, 397-
398.

Great Britain, classes of legal enactments
in, 77 ff.

Great men, value of, as national posses-
sions, 203-204.

Greek, the study of, 319, 320, 321,
323, 324 ff.

Green, J. R., historical style of, 352-
353-

Green Moxmtain Boys, the, 271-272.

Green Moimtains, forest preserves in
the, 402.

Guicciardini, historical style of, 351.

Guizot, French historian, 347.

H

Hague Court, the, 250.
Hallam, Henry, 345.
Hamilton, Alexander, 411.

43°

mDEX

Hampden, John, 4.

Heidelberg University, founding of, 154.

Henry, Patrick, 215.

Herodotus, an originator of historical
composition, 343-344.

History, intellectual enjoyment from
study of, 26 ; risk of too close atten-
tion to dry details and exact methods
in, 30; address on Architecture and,
181 £E. ; architecture the interpreter
of, 187; specialization in study of,
305-306 ; wherein lies the profit of
knowledge of, 32g; literature the
best source of knowledge of, 329-330;
the classical age of Greece and Rome
as an introduction to, 330-331 ; ad-
dress on the Writing and Teaching
of, 339 ff. ; present zeal for, contrasted
with earlier lack of interest at uni-
versities, 341-342 ; importance of
study of ecclesiastical, 342-343 ; the
scientific treatment of, 343 £E. ; He-
rodotus and Thucydides models for
writers of, 334; so-called Uterary
school of writers of, 344-346 ; scientific
school of writers represented by
Niebuhr, Guizot, Ranke, etc., 346-
349 ; causes leading to scientific
handling of, 348-349 ; dryness of the
modern scientific writers of, 349-
350; examples of mingled literary
and scientific treatment of, 352-353;
scientific school of, represented by
Buckle and Herbert Spencer, 354-
359 ; qualities demanded for the
highest kind of work in, 363-364.

Hudson, Henry, 268, 273.

Imagination, necessity of, in writing of
history, 364; cultivation of, by read-
ing fiction and poetry, 376-377.

Independence of mind in reading, 386-
387.

India, American missions in, 135.

Individual, rights of the, under the
Common Law, 45-46.

Initiative, the, 115.

Iowa, State University of, address to,
281 B.

Ireland, tribute to great men originating
in, 173, 222-223; proposal to settle
Dutch in, 208; recent improvements
efiected in, 223-224.

Jackson, Andrew, 215.

Jamestown Island, address delivered

at, I fE.
Japan, relations of, with United States,

258.
Jefferson, Thomas, 8 ; address on, 107 S.
Jentryns, Sir Her:iy, 88.
Johns Hopkins University, address at,

299 ff.
Johnson, Samuel, 221.
Jokes in pubhc speaking, 290-291.
Jonson, Ben, 3.
Judgment, freedom of, in reading, 386-

387.
Jury, the, as a feature of the Common

Law, 60-62.

Kelvin, Lord, a Scotch-Irishman, 220-

221.
Kennedy, Lord Justice, 71.
Kidd, Captain, 215.
Knowledge, joy in, a gift of imiversity

Ufe, 168.

Lake Mohonk Conference address, 247 fi.

La Salle, 8, 269, 270, 271.

Latin, the study of classical, 319 ff. ;
loss from reading Uterature in trans-
lations, 334-337-

Law, interrelation of liberty and, 14;
appreciation of value of, by Pilgrim
Fathers, 38-39 ; drawbacks to the
study of, 186. See Common Law.

Lawrence, Sir Henry, 220.

Lea, Henry C, 305, 352, 361.

Lee, Robert E., 11.

Legality, spirit of, in England, due to
influence of the Common Law, 68-
69.

Legislation, address on Conditions and
Methods of, 73 ff.

Liberty, inseparabihty of law and, 14.

Lincoln, Saint-Gaudens' statue of, 177;
address on the Character and Career
of, 19s ff. ; universal admiration and
honour of, in America, 224—225.

Lingard, John, 351, 361.

Liquor traffic, evils of, among barbarous
peoples, 141.

INDEX

431

Literary historians, school of, 344-346.

Literary ornament in public speaking,
289-290.

Literature, instruction in, compared
with instruction in science as to results
in later Ufe, 20 ff. ; the mental stimu-
lus and pleasure of poetry, 27-28;
effect of training in, on true appre-
ciation of art, 28-29 ; dangers of too
close attention to technicalities of,
29-30 ; the best source of a knowledge
of history, 329-330.

Livingstone, David, 132.

Lowell, J. R., as a public speaker, 291.

Lucretius cited, 129.

M

Macaulay, as a historical writer, 352 ;
rapidity as a reader, 385.

Magellan, spirit which actuated, Ln
explorations, 8, 269.

Magna Charta, 56.

Maitland, F. W., 348.

Marshall, Chief Justice, 11; a Scotch-
Irishman, 215.

Mason, George, 8.

Mayflower compact, 38-39.

Michaelis, J. D., 347.

Milton, John, 4.

Missions, address on, 125 S. ; work of,
begun by the Apostles, 129; as car-
ried on by Charlemagne and later
conquering forces, 129-130; later
propagation of Christianity by peace-
ful methods, 130; the fourth or pres-
ent-day stage of, 130-132; work of
American and British, 134-136 ; causes
of comparatively slow progress of
modem, 136 ff. ; desirability of com-
plete separation from political sup-
port, 144-145; the present a critical
moment for, 146-150; objects to be
aimed at by, 150.

Mommsen, Theodor, 348, 362.

Moore, Thomas, as a historian, 345.

Morris, William, 191.

Motley, John Lothrop, 345.

Muratori, rank of, as a historical writer,
344-

N

National Parks, address on, 389 ff.
Natural history, enjoyment to be de-
rived from pursuit of, 23-24

Natural sciences, dangers of too great

specialization in study of, 306 ff., 326;

influence of. on the writing of history,

348.
Nature, appreciation of pleasures of,

to be derived from literary training,

28.
Negroes, first African, imported into

America, 7.
New South Wales, national parks in,

398.
Newspapers, responsibility of, for iU-

feeUng between nations, 255-256.
New York City, magnificence of archi-
tectural enterprises in, 194, 197.
New York State Bar Association address,

73 ff-
New Zealand, national park in, 398.
Niagara Falls, deterioration in scenery

of, 396.
Niebuhr, German historian, 347.
Notes, use of, in pubUc speaking, 294.
Novel reading, 374-377.

Oral evidence, practice of using, under
English Common Law, 62, 67.

Orders in Council, English, 78.

Ornament, Hterary, in public speaking,
289-290.

Oxford University, early instruction
in Roman law at, 66; the beginnings
of, 153-154; chief aims and purposes
of, 157-160.

Parkman, Francis, 348, 352.

Parliamentary draftsman, office of,
87-88.

ParUamentary legislation, English sys-
tem of, 76 ff.

Patrick, St., 129.

Pennsylvania Society of New York,
address to the, 407 ff.

Pennsylvania Station, New York, archi-
tecture of, 194.

Perigueux, restoration of cathedral
church of, 190.

Philosophy, intellectual pleasures and
enjoyment from study of, 26.

Pilgrims, address on the Landing of
the, 33 ff. ; motive of, in settling in

432

INDEX

America, 36-37; eflfect of character
of, on State they helped to found,
37-38; comparison of ancient Romans
and, 38; value of law recognized by,
38-39 ; effect of traditions and mem-
ory of high thoughts bequeathed by,
39-40.

Pitt, William, 284.

Poetry, as a source of mental stimulus
and pleasure, 27-28; the reading of,
374; cultivation of the imagination
by, 376-377; choice of, for reading,
377-

Pollock, Sir Frederick, 71.

Portland, Me., address, 41 ff.

Prague, University of, founding of, 154.

Precedent, weight of, in judicial decisions
under the Common Law, 48-49.

Precision, principle of, in the Common
Law, 47—49.

Presbyterian system of church govern-
ment, formation of republican spirit
in America by, 214-215.

Priestley, Joseph, 346.

Private acts, British, 77, 81 £f.; in
France, 95.

Provincetown, Mass., address, 33 S.

Psychology as a field for intellectual
enjoyment, 26-27.

Public Speaking, Some Hints on, 281 S.

Public spirit, effects of intellectual
training upon, 122.

Pym, John, 4.

Q

Quakers, among the early settlers of
Pennsylvania, 409-410.

R

Rainier, Mount, 397.

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 4.

Ranke, L. von, 348, 362.

Reading, address on Some Hints on,
365 fi. ; choosing the best in, 368-
369; dryness no sign of excellence in
books for, 369-370; question of ex-
tent of field to be covered in, 371-
374; of fiction, 374-376; of poetry,
376-377 ; of classics of other countries,
378; purpose and concentration in,
378-380; methods to be followed in,
381-383; system in, 383-385; de-
sirability of swiftness in, 385-386 ;
independence of mind in, 386-387.

Referendum, the, 115.

Restoration of churches in England and
France, 189-191.

Robertson, J. C, historian, 345.

Roman law, characteristics of English
Common Law originating in, 67.

Romans, character of the ancient, com-
pared with that of Pilgrim Fathers,
38.

Root, Elihu, 261 .

Russell, Sir Charles, a Scotch-Irishman,
220.

Rutgers College address, 365 ff.

Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, address on

the Art of, 171 ff.
San Francisco Bay, praise of, 230.
Scenery, of Vermont, 276-279 ; conserva-
tion of American, by creating national

parks, 394 ff.
Schiller, as a historian, 345.
Science, far-reaching effects of modem,

17-18; comparison of instruction in,

and of instruction in literature as to

intellectual enjoyment in later life,

20 ff.
Sciences, specialization in study of,

306 ff.
Scotch-Irish, as settlers in Pennsyl-
vania, 410.
Scotland, universities of, 155, 160;

exclusion of the public from the best

scenery of, 394.
Scoto-Irish Race in Lister and in

America, address on, 205 ff.
Sculpture, consideration of the art of,

174-176.
Seeley, Professor, 350.
Shakespeare, 3 ; enjoyment derived by,

from his feUow-men, 25.
Shaw Memorial, Boston, 177-178.
Sidney, Sir Philip, 4.
Slavery, beginnings of negro, in America,

7 ; view taken of, by the Common

Law, 59-60.
Slave trade, as a retarding force to

progress of Christianity, 143.
Sorrow, Saint-Gaudens' statue of, 177.
Spanish adventurers contrasted with

English, 9.
Specialization in imiversity education,

302 S.
Spencer, Herbert, 358, 359.

INDEX

433

Spenser, Edmund, 4; the reading of,
374-

Spinoza, 340.

Spoils system in American national
government, 422-423.

State Universities, address on the Mis-
sion of, 151 ff. See Universities.

Statute law, British, 85 fE.

Statutory Rules and Orders, English,
78, 79-

Stubbs, William, 348.

Switzerland, legislative method in, 95 ;
cooperation of legislative and execu-
tive branches of government in, 419-
420; influence of American Constitu-
tion on latest constitution of, 424.

Tacoma, Moimt, 397.

Tariff legislation, 97.

Teachers in schools, importance of in-
fluence exercised by, 242-243.

Tennyson, Alfred, 197.

Thorwaldsen, the work of, 175.

Thucydides, a master of historical com-
position, 344; critically exact spirit
shown by, 349; historical style of,
353-

Tocqueville, quoted, 105.

Torture, use of, forbidden by the Com-
mon Law, 62, 63.

Translations, question of use of, in
studying ancient hterature, 334-336.

Truth, devotion to, to be instilled by a
imiversity education, 122-123, 168.

Tyranny, the Common Law a safe-
guard against, 46-47 ; Thomas Jef-
ferson's views of, 113-114.

U

Ulster, the Scotch-Irish of, 217-220.

Union College, address at, 339 S.

Universities, address on the Mission
of State, 151 fif. ; origins of the earliest,
153-155; consideration of German,
English, and Scottish, 156—160; char-
acteristics of American, 160-161 ;
founding and supporting of, by state
governments, 1 6 1- 163 ; risks to state-
controlled, of curbing of freedom
and of favouring branches from which
pecuniary gain may be expected, 163-
166; the great benefits to be derived
from, 167-168; ways for graduates

to repay their debt to, 168-169;
address on " What a University may
Do for a State," 2272.; opportunities
open to, for State service, 239 fi. ;
promotion of athletics at expense of
intellectual excellence in, 240-242 ;
influence exercised by alumni of,
in forming public opinion, 242 ;
function of demonstrating the wealth
in life besides mere material things,
243 ; address on Special and General
Education in, 299 ff. ; specialization
in studies at, 303 ff.

University education, effects of, on men
as regards politics, pubHc spirit, and
devotion to truth, 11 6-1 23.

University instruction and intellectual
pleasures, 15 ff.

Vacarius, Lombard instructor of law,

66.
Vermont, the founders of, 271-272;

resources of, in its people and its

scenery, 275-276.
Virgil, quoted, 22.
Virginia, address on the Beginnings of,

1 ff.
Virginia, University of, address at, 107

ff. ; Jefferson's aims and motives in

founding, in.
Virginia Company in London, 9, 10.

W

Washington, George, 109, 203, 411.

Water power, utilization of, to detri-
ment of scenery, 396.

Watt, James, 17.

White Mountains, creation of forest
reserves in the, 402-403.

Wilhams, Roger, 37.

Wilson, James, 411-412.

Wisconsin, University of. Commence-
ment Address to, 151 ff.

Witherspoon, John, 214.

Wolf, F. A., Prolegomena to Homer of,
346.

Wordsworth, William, 29, 197.

Yellowstone National Park, 397.
Yosemite Park, 397 ; exclusion of auto-
mobiles from, 398-399.

I

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No./V>S'/ Sect. T Shelf ;S^
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